Where to begin with the Washington Post’s woeful “profile” of blogger/activist/doxxer Charles C. Johnson? You could start with the View from Nowhere, which posits that Johnson’s threat to release the name and address of the alleged University of Virginia rape victim at the center of Rolling Stone’s widely challenged story—he would defer, if she told “the truth about making it up”—was “pugnacious.” You could continue with how Johnson is described as a “one-time Daily Caller contributor,” without any mention of how his imploded stories alleging that then-Newark Mayor Cory Booker did not live in Newark, and that a New York Times reporter once posed for Playgirl, marked the end of his relationship with the site. (The Post only notes that Johnson contributed to the “hooker” stories about New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez that were “shredded” by other reporters.) You might wonder why the profile fails to mention Johnson’s “doxxing” of two New York Times reporters, and his subsequent reporting about how one of the reporters was calling police about the threats she was getting. Your eyebrow might levitate at how Johnson’s stories alleging criminal behavior from the victims of police shootings are described as “lampoon[s].”
The gist, as Matt Lewis writes at the Daily Caller, is that the Post was “romanticizing the work of someone who is threatening to reveal personal details about an alleged rape victim.” And I think it missed the context. (That’s truly strange, because Post reporters have driven the skeptical, debunking coverage of the Rolling Stone story.) Johnson, like any good exploiter of the news cycle, is attempting to tap into a backlash against the way the media reports on rape. The Rolling Stone story was initially embraced by the media, and especially by the ideological media that had recently explored the idea of “rape culture.” Holding back the identities of rape victims was a standard media practice, but Rolling Stone was seen to be pushing the envelope, allowing its subject, “Jackie,” to tell her story without rebuttal from the alleged rapists.
