WaPo | There are lots of media stories revolving around campaign 2016. We
can thank CNN for many of them, including the drawbacks of placing
political hacks on the payroll of prominent news outlets and of spending
too much time airing Trump rallies. Fake news stories also have had a
glorious run, as have the ethics of reporting on the FBI and the Justice
Department; fact-checking organizations are entitled to a long
post-election vacation; and journalism professors will be referring for
decades to Election 2016 as a crucible of false equivalence.
The
media story of the 2016 campaign, however, is the anti-Semitic backlash
against journalists critical of Donald Trump. Political hacks at cable
networks, after all, aren’t exactly a new thing; nor are fake news
stories or overworked fact-checkers; and people have been griping about
false equivalence before Donald Trump came along and invalidated all
political comparisons. The horrific and voluminous anti-Semitic attacks
against journalists writing about Trump, however, are new and very
frightening. “I myself have never experienced something like this,” says
Eisner, 60, whose resume includes more than two decades at the Philadelphia Inquirer.
“This” is the subject of a recent exhaustive report by the Anti-Defamation League under the title, “Anti-Semitic Targeting of Journalists During the 2016 Presidential Campaign.”
The study focused on the playground for this rash of hatred — Twitter,
that is. Between August 2015 and July 2016, it found that 800
journalists were targeted in almost 20,000 anti-Semitic tweets. The top
10 targets got it the worst, receiving 83 percent of the Twitter-born
anti-Semitism. As to the provenance of this madness, the ADL report
chooses its words with precision: “There is evidence that a considerable
number of the anti-Semitic tweets targeting journalists originate with
people identifying themselves as Trump supporters, ‘conservatives’ or
extreme right-wing elements.”
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