Tucker, Times tussle over harassment of journalist
Tucker Carlson’s belittling of a reporter for The New York Times this week for publicly discussing how she had been harassed reveals both a toxic online culture and bad blood between the newspaper and Fox News Channel and its most popular personality.
The targeting of reporter Taylor Lorenz started a day after the International Women’s Media Foundation announced it is starting a new resource center for journalists subject to online abuse.
Lorenz, a technology reporter who covers internet culture for the Times, on Tuesday had tweeted her followers to consider supporting women who were enduring online harassment.
“It’s not an exaggeration to say that the harassment and smear campaign I’ve had to endure over the past year has destroyed my life,” she tweeted. “No one should have to go through this. The scope of attack has been unimaginable. It has taken everything from me.”
Carlson pointed out the tweet that night on his show, which usually reaches between 3 million to 4 million viewers each weeknight.
He cited her as a privileged person claiming victimhood.
“Destroyed her life?” he said. “Really? By most people’s standards, Taylor Lorenz would seem to have a pretty good life, one of
the best lives in the country, in fact.”
Carlson was supported by journalist Glenn Greenwald, an occasional guest on his show.
Greenwald wrote that someone involved in polarizing debates should expect pushback. “It’s still just online insults,” he tweeted. “That’s not persecution.”
Carlson and the Times have a history. Last summer, he said on the air that the Times was working on a story about his house in Maine.
He broadcast the names of the journalists supposedly working on the story, and they later said they had been subject to online abuse and, in one case, an attempted break-in. No Times story was written about Carlson’s Maine house.
The Times, in a statement Wednesday, said Carlson’s attack on Lorenz “was a calculated and cruel tactic, which he regularly deploys to unleash a wave of harassment and vitriol at his intended target.”
Fox backed up its star with its own response: “No public figure or journalist is immune from legitimate criticism of their reporting, claims or journalistic tactics.”
Carlson said there is real harassment in the world, but an online attack against Lorenz “is not it.”