Media Twitter: On Bed Bugs, the NYT and thin-skinned columnists

Updated 8/28/19

It all started with a story on Slate Monday noting that several locations in the New York Times building were infested with bed bugs. This led to the following tweet from NY Times visual journalism director Stuart Thompson:

“Breaking – there are bedbugs in the NYT newsroom

-Stuart A. Thompson (@staurtathompson) August 26, 2019″ (since deleted)

Later on Monday, Dave Karpf, an associate professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University, used this news to poke fun at conservative Pulitzer Prize winning NYT columnist Bret Stephens.

Initially it achieved something like 9 likes and no shares. Pretty small by Twitter standards.  By comparison, my tweet that same day complaining about academics making poor choices about Reply All on e-mail attracted 24 likes and 1 retweet.

But then Bret Stephens did something foolish – he publicized Dr. Karpf’s tweet by an e-mail to Karpf, CCed to the George Washington provost:

Karpf, writing in Esquire, notes the irony of Stephens’ comments:

The irony, of course, is that Bret Stephens regularly pens columns decrying the culture of “safe spaces” on college campuses. He once wrote a column titled “Free Speech and the Necessity of Discomfort.” (Discomfort for thee, but not for me, it would seem…)

In that column, based on a speech Stephens gave at the University of Michigan last year, he wrote:

In other words, if we aren’t making our readers uncomfortable every day, we aren’t doing our job. There’s an old saying that the role of the journalist is to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, but the saying is wrong. The role of the journalist is to afflict, period….

The truth may set you free, but first it is going to tick you (or at least a lot of other people) off.

And this wasn’t the only time:

In other words, Stephens is fine with journalists like himself making people uncomfortable, but not with other people making him uncomfortable.

Stephens followed up his e-mail with a visit to MSNBC the following morning:

Umm, I’m not a columnist or academic of national stature, but as a general rule when you send an e-mail to an academic complaining about him or her and then copy it to their boss, you are almost always trying to get the academic in some kind of professional trouble.

In the end, Stephens’ e-mail really didn’t hurt Karpf, but it did bring a lot of unwanted attention to Stephens. London’s Guardian newspaper ran a major story about it, as did the  Washington Post:

And as the Post’s Pulitzer Prize winning columnist Kathleen Parker points out, readers have called her far worse things then a “bedbug.”  In fact, there was a whole genre of Twitter posts today from women and people of color listing worse things they had been called online. Consider the following thread:

I’m not going to post the actual insults, but if you follow the above tweet, you’ll probably wish you hadn’t looked.

Karpf says he has little to fear from Stephens:

I am a tenured academic, with the support of my university of administration and my disciplinary peers. I am also, like Stephens, a white guy. If either of us was a woman or person of color, we would endure far worse insults online every day. My life will go on and so will his. He will have a new nickname that he doesn’t care for; I will have some new Twitter followers who will soon learn that I am less funny than they had hoped.

Perhaps the one who has been hurt the most by Stephens’ e-mail is… Stephens, who announced today that he was leaving Twitter:

Correction: An earlier version of this post said that Dr. Karpf was at Georgetown University. He is actually at George Washington University.