Bloomberg Law has revised — but refused to retract or correct — a misleading article that accused a Department of Labor official of posting anti-Semitic content on social media, after the accused staffer, who resigned over the accusation, was reinstated.
Leif Olson resigned from the Department of Labor on Wednesday after Bloomberg Law reporter Ben Penn reached out to the agency for comment regarding a series of years-old Facebook posts in which Olson used bigoted tropes to mock the anti-Semitism prevalent on the so called alt-right. Bloomberg ignored this nuance and characterized Olson’s comments as anti-Semitic in the resulting headline and article.
“Following a thorough reexamination of the available information and upon reflection, the Department has concluded that Mr. Olson has satisfactorily explained the tone of the content of his sarcastic social media posts and will return to his position in the Wage and Hour Division,” the Department of Labor (DOL) announced in a statement first obtained by The Daily Caller.
Despite the Department of Labor’s recognition that the Facebook posts were not genuinely anti-Semitic — a sentiment shared by the Anti-Defamation League, which initially condemned the comments but later retracted its statement — Bloomberg Law has refused to retract the article or issue a correction. Instead, a Bloomberg Law editor wrote an article reporting Olson’s reinstatement on Wednesday evening and Penn’s initial article was revised Thursday morning.
“In light of the subsequent events, we removed ‘Anti-Semitic’ from the headline and clarified Olson’s reference to those tropes,” the revision reads.
Journalists and pundits from across the political spectrum harshly criticized Penn over the lack of context in his article, which excluded the relevant fact that Penn was mocking anti-Semitic congressional candidate Paul Nehlen following his resounding defeat by Paul Ryan in 2016.
“The guy just suffered a massive, historic, emasculating 70-point victory. Let’s see him and his Georgetown cocktail-party puppetmasters try to walk that one off,” Olson wrote of Ryan, mocking the tendency of Nehlen and friendly media outlets to question the masculinity of establishment Republican figures.
Penn has refused to apologize for ignoring relevant context, maintaining that he accurately reported on Olson’s comments, which, he argues, were especially notable due to the lawyer’s preference for laissez-faire labor policy.
https://twitter.com/benjaminpenn/status/1168962326340526081?s=20
Olson responded to his reinstatement by thanking those who have defended him.
https://twitter.com/olsonleif/status/1169388215020773376?s=20