On Sunday host Brian Stelter spoke with The Washington Post’s Taylor Lorenz, who last week doxxed the person behind the Libs of Tik Tok Twitter account.
As Stelter asked her if she was “always determined to identify the person” and “was that like the most important part of the story for you,” Lorenz gave an answer that only she could. She just had to doxx the person behind it because it might be a foreign agent.
“And I think it’s incredibly important, you know, as someone that covers the influencer industry to know who is exerting influence in this way. I mean, for all we knew, this could have been a foreign actor, right, or someone — we just didn’t know,” Lorenz claimed.
Lorenz also went on to attempt to justify why it was that she had to doxx the creator. “And so, I thought, hey, look, this account has massive power, massive influence. This woman is basically on an entire right-wing media tour. She gives interviews to The New York Post, Tucker [Carlson], all of that, and registered as a media company, registered a trademark,” Lorenz claimed. “So, yeah, I wanted to — I thought it was quite important and in the public’s interest to find out who was running it.”
NewsBusters’ Kevin Tober highlighted the segment as well, and as one can see from Lorenz’s response, she barely answered any of the questions. As Lorenz focused on lies based solely on emotion, she continued to justify her journalistic standards.
Addressing these “conservative parents,” Lorenz offered that “you can have concern about what your children are learning in school and not follow an LGBTQ hate account that’s, the whole goal is to get trans and LGBTQ people sort of excluded from public life and drive these very harmful narratives around trans people. I mean, that’s — those are two very, very, very, very different things, right?” She also trashed the creator for having the audacity to have “talked about mobilizing her base to run for local school boards and is collecting email lists, which 100 percent are going to be used for political purposes. This is a political force, this is an influential media force.”
“The idea that this woman is not newsworthy is quite nonsense, you know what I mean? I cover influencers for a living and I’m telling you this woman is more influential than a lot of people that I cover,” Lorenz went on to say, even claiming that “the right will make those arguments because they don’t want scrutiny.”
In response, even Stelter pointed out that “that’s a very blunt statement” for Lorenz to have made, only to later say “I appreciate you’re willing to talk about this and you’re willing to take on the scrutiny as someone covering this”
As the segment continued, Lorenz even denied that she engaged in doxxing.
“Doxxing means revealing highly, highly personal nonpublic information with the goal of harassment or sort of destroying someone’s life. We absolutely did not reveal any personal information about this woman at all. Remotely, and you know, I know that sometimes reporting practices can seem foreign to people that are not familiar with journalism but this was very by the book and very benign. The thing is the right-wing media will lie,” Lorenz said, as she continued to rant about her critics.
As Landon covered, Lorenz not only revealed personal information, which unnecessarily involved this person’s religion, she visited relatives to try to talk to them about her hit piece.
This is an excerpt from Townhall.
Scroll down to leave a comment and share your thoughts.
