Washington Post columnist Taylor Lorenz is a regular object of conservative ire — and rightly so. When Lorenz went to great lengths to find and publicize the identity of Chaya Raichik, the woman behind the once-anonymous right-wing “Libs of Tik Tok” Twitter account, the Post journalist defended the move as “basic reporting practices.” (Raichik, for her part, said that she had to “hole up in a safe location” to wait out the backlash sparked by Lorenz’s reporting.) Lorenz “even showed up to the home of the account owner’s relatives and harassed a random Instagram user with a similar name, asserting that she was going to be ‘implicated as starting a hate campaign against LGBTQ people,’” the Spectator’s Amber Athey reported at the time. The Washington Examiner‘s Jerry Dunleavy noted that Lorenz “originally linked to the real estate license for the person behind the Libs of TikTok account,” which included her real name and a physical address. According to a statement from the Post, the link “to publicly available professional information” was “ultimately deemed . . . unnecessary” and removed. But of course, this is the internet we’re talking about; the damage was already done.
Lorenz’s latest Post column, “Online mobs are now coming for student journalists,” takes a considerably different line:
Olivia Krupp, a sophomore at the University of Arizona, knew she wanted to write for the student newspaper since she started college. She was hoping to build her reporting and interviewing skills and was thrilled when a spot on the paper opened up the second semester of her freshman year.
But since late September, after writing a critical profile of a TikTok star and fellow student, she has received an onslaught of harassment that has upended her life.
Krupp’s ordeal highlights the growing threat that online harassment poses to journalists, especially those just starting out. Targeted online harassment has become a pervasive threat to newsrooms across the country. A 2019 survey by the Committee to Protect Journalists found that 85 percent of respondents believed their career had become less safe in the past five years and more than 70 percent said they experienced safety issues or threats as part of doing their job. [Emphasis added.]
Of course, student journalists are in a different category from Twitter accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers, but the aim of Lorenz’s story is to connect the backlash against student journalists to online attacks on professional journalists. Lorenz has routinely made herself out to be a victim when she becomes a subject of the same kind of online criticism that she regularly sics on right-wing influencers. The upshot: “It’s basic reporting practices when we do it to them. It’s online harassment when they do it to us.”