Michael Hoffman is, to say the least, not sympathetic about yesterday’s news that Donald Trump supporters are embarking on a campaign to make Trump’s media non-fans’ words reach public view:

On the front page of the August 25 edition of the New York Times, two reporters, Kenneth P. Vogel and Jeremy W. Peters, decry a new movement by Right wing researchers among Donald Trump’s base, aimed at sleuthing into the background and statements of journalists in the employ of the legacy media.

These investigations have been declared to be off-limits and “clearly not journalism.” So saith Washington Post’s Lord High Emeritus Executive Editor, Leonard Downie Jr.
He alleges that an “organized, wide-scale political effort to intentionally humiliate journalists and others who work for media outlets” is something new.
One wonders on what desert island he’s been sojourning. The censorship, doxing, boycotts and obstruction of revisionists, black nationalists and Conservative and Christian journalists don’t seem to register or even exist for media Brahmins of the upper crust.
Follow the money: the legacy media will brook no competition that harms its lucrative monopoly on news. Therefore, we dissident journalists are supposed to know our place and be content with our lot as virtually invisible. The many attempts to humiliate, libel, obstruct and remove us from Google, YouTube, Facebook, Amazon, Twitter and Instagram are of no concern to the High and Mighty in the legacy press.
“It’s one thing for Spiro Agnew to call everyone in the press ‘nattering nabobs of negativism,’ Mr. Downie said, referring to Agnew’s critique of how journalists covered President Nixon. “And another thing to investigate individuals in order to embarrass them publicly and jeopardize their employment.”
This is precisely what several corporate newspaper chains, cable television news, websites, blogs and podcasts have been doing for years, including the NY Times — calling for the dismissal and loss of employment of alternative reporters who have been smeared as anti-Semitic, racist, sexist, homophobic, and so on.

A. G. Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times, said in a statement that exposure of shady biographical facts about Times reporters was a case of taking Trump’s “campaign against a free press to a new level. They are seeking to harass and embarrass anyone affiliated with the leading news organizations that are asking tough questions and bringing uncomfortable truths to light,” Mr. Sulzberger declared.

When such tactics are used against the “leading” news organizations they are immoral and wrong. However, when the Times, Washington Post and CNN smear, intimidate and prevent alternative journalists who work for smaller online operations from “asking tough questions and bringing uncomfortable truths to light,” then it’s not at all a matter for outrage. The news aristocrats have spoken. You may now kiss their designer shoes.

Mr. Sulzberger takes the moral high ground on behalf of his very profitable and powerful business behemoth:

“The goal of this campaign is clearly to intimidate journalists from doing their job, which includes serving as a check on power and exposing wrongdoing when it occurs. The Times will not be intimidated or silenced.”

What about journalists who seek a check on your monopoly power and wrong-doing Mr. Sulzberger? What of your newspaper’s endeavor to jeopardize our employment?

Mr. Sulzberger’s heresy-hunting NY Times has shown zero interest in defending conservative reporters who are not members of the legacy media from calumny and blacklisting.

Often the Times has been guilty of these odious tactics, which it now indignantly protests when its political rivals and business competitors employ them to deflate the reputation of the Times, and inform the public concerning the questionable character of some of its writers and editors.

In many cases Sulzberger’s newspaper has encouraged those attacks and covered up for thought police groups like Right Wing Watch and “Media Matters for America” that closely investigate and attack conservative journalists, and Sleeping Giants, which is sworn to threaten and shame any platform online that dares to host radical alternatives to politically correct dogma and revolutionary social change.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) is a prominent thought police group campaigning for the censorship of history books at Amazon, the silencing of black leaders like Louis Farrakhan, and of activists who are outside the established boundary of permissible opinions about Israeli settler-colonialism and the racist creed of the Babylonian Talmud. Over the years, the New York Times has been a dependable mouthpiece for the ADL and complicit in its libel and intimidation—yet theTimes is horrified now that such tactics are being wielded against its own writers. Here we observe the grotesque hypocrisy of the entitled.

In June the heresy-hunters at Google’s YouTube removed several legitimate revisionist history videos, together with many white supremacist and hate speech videos. Having accepted without investigation Google’s deceitful description of all the videos it removed from YouTube as constituting “hate speech,” the New York Times mechanically reported the entire ban in terms of taking down hate speech. Our video exposing Deborah Lipstadt’s hate speech toward historian David Irving was one of the films banned from YouTube. Consequently, our video which fulfilled a public service by advancing knowledge about the hate speech of an Establishment-revered Zionist celebrity (Lipstadt), was banned in the name of combating hate speech. TheTimes cooperated and was party to the masquerade. Revisionist researchers and activists are barely human in the eyes of the Times, and unworthy of the anguish and hand-wringing now being expended to defend their own hired hands from suppression and removal. This corrosive double standard undercuts Mr. Sulzberger’s protestations and reveals the corruption at the heart of his newspaper’s reporting. …

I can’t abide Trump but I consider these exposures of privileged  members of the legacy media delightful, due to the fact that said media have acquiesced in massive censorship and denial of service on Facebook, YouTube, Google and in Amazon’s censorship of historians’ dissident books. In these instances involving alternative writers and journalists who compete with the NY Times and other legacy media, there has been little or no solidarity offered by your fellow reporters and editors.

In many cases where the harassed and interdicted alternative journalists are Conservatives, there have been expressions from members of the legacy media of satisfaction at the heresy-hunting, doxing and removals.

Now, when the shoe is on the other foot, we’re supposed to believe the process of sleuthing into journalists’ public and private foibles and failings is somehow an outrage against press freedom?

Freedom of the press does not begin at the gate of the legacy media. The Times, the Post, CNN etc. were the ones who first let the genie out of the bottle. You ought to deal with the karmic consequences without whining.

Better yet, work for the freedom of expression of your lumpen proletariat rivals online.

Nor is Streiff:

If you’ve ever watched CNN’s rainman, Andrew Kaczynski, aka @KFile, at work you know how this stupid gotcha game is played. You go back through the target’s writings, often delving into college newspaper columns, looking for untoward things that they may have said and then splash the findings across the internet as though they were particularly relevant. This is an example that is happening now where out of context and completely defensible statements are being manipulated by CNN to try to torpedo an appeals court nominee:

Steven Menashi, who is nominated for the Second Circuit, wrote dozens of editorials and blog posts in the late 1990s and early 2000s for a number of college and professional conservative publications.
https://t.co/PCuYO2pN4N

— andrew kaczynski🤔 (@KFILE) August 22, 2019

So today, the New York Times reported that what was sauce for the goose will be sauce for the gander in 2020. …

The group, so far, has been responsible for the firing of a CNN photo editor who liked to tweet anti-Semitic stuff in his free time and it unearthed racist and anti-Semitic writings by a New York Times politics editor named Tom Wright-Piersanti

#BREAKING: Another anti-Semite exposed at the @nytimes.

Exclusive — ‘Crappy Jew Year’: New York Times Editor’s Antisemitism, Racism Exposed https://t.co/dwaQQHJvgG via @BreitbartNews

— Arthur Schwartz (@ArthurSchwartz) August 22, 2019

There are more on the way:

The operation has compiled social media posts from Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, and stored images of the posts that can be publicized even if the user deletes them, said the people familiar with the effort. One claimed that the operation had unearthed potentially “fireable” information on “several hundred” people.

“I am sure there will be more scalps,” said Sam Nunberg, a former aide to Mr. Trump who is a friend of Mr. Schwartz.

Mr. Nunberg and others who are familiar with the campaign described it as meant to expose what they see as the hypocrisy of mainstream news outlets that have reported on the president’s inflammatory language regarding race.

“Two can play at this game,” he said. “The media has long targeted Republicans with deep dives into their social media, looking to caricature all conservatives and Trump voters as racists.”

They are also aggregating social media and other writings by spouses and associates of major media reporters. What I particularly like is that the group isn’t going after obviously hostile reporters, they are simply going after any employee of the organization. If nothing else, this should make some of the staff meetings in these outlets rather gothic.

Predictably, the media has been stopped by a bout of fecal incontinence:

But using journalistic techniques to target journalists and news organizations as retribution for — or as a warning not to pursue — coverage critical of the president is fundamentally different from the well-established role of the news media in scrutinizing people in positions of power.

“If it’s clearly retaliatory, it’s clearly an attack, it’s clearly not journalism,” said Leonard Downie Jr., who was the executive editor of The Post from 1991 to 2008. Tension between a president and the news media that covers him is nothing new, Mr. Downie added. But an organized, wide-scale political effort to intentionally humiliate journalists and others who work for media outlets is.

“It’s one thing for Spiro Agnew to call everyone in the press ‘nattering nabobs of negativism,’” he said, referring to the former vice president’s famous critique of how journalists covered President Richard M. Nixon. “And another thing to investigate individuals in order to embarrass them publicly and jeopardize their employment.”

A. G. Sulzberger, the publisher of The Times, said in a statement that such tactics were taking the president’s campaign against a free press to a new level.

“They are seeking to harass and embarrass anyone affiliated with the leading news organizations that are asking tough questions and bringing uncomfortable truths to light,” Mr. Sulzberger said. “The goal of this campaign is clearly to intimidate journalists from doing their job, which includes serving as a check on power and exposing wrongdoing when it occurs. The Times will not be intimidated or silenced.”

In a statement, a CNN spokesman said that when government officials, “and those working on their behalf, threaten and retaliate against reporters as a means of suppression, it’s a clear abandonment of democracy for something very dangerous.” …

This is just bullsh**. The media has long ago given up the pretense of being anything but an adjunct of the Democrat party. Their reporters a closely affiliated with far left outlets. The leaking of John Podesta’s emails showed that reporters, such as the incompetent lecher Glenn Thrush, sent their stories to Democrat operatives for approval. They are a combatant and they need to be treated as such.

Streiff then posted:

If the New York Times thought the Fourth Estate was going to rally to their defense, they were sadly disappointed. This is how the Washington Post’s media critic treated it Breitbart burned the New York Times. And the Times really doesn’t like it.

They are bad actors. They are driven to suppress legitimate inquiry. They are by no means journalists.

And they read Twitter very carefully!

Those are the contours of an alarm rung on Sunday by the New York Times. “A loose network of conservative operatives allied with the White House is pursuing what they say will be an aggressive operation to discredit news organizations deemed hostile to President Trump by publicizing damaging information about journalists,” wrote Kenneth P. Vogel and Jeremy W. Peters.

And just what would this “damaging information” be? Illicitly obtained DMs? Gossip about their sexual habits? HIPAA-protected information?

Nope. “Four people familiar with the operation described how it works, asserting that it has compiled dossiers of potentially embarrassing social media posts and other public statements by hundreds of people who work at some of the country’s most prominent news organizations.” Bolding added to note that this “damaging information” is available not only to a “loose network of conservative operatives” but also to the loose network of everyone with access to the Internet.

I was on my second cigarette by the time I got this far. It gets better.

Yet at the same time, Sulzberger all but admitted that the information supplied by Schwartz and Co. can be relevant to the management of the New York Times: “No organization is above scrutiny, including The Times. We have high standards, own our mistakes and always strive to do better. If anyone — even those acting in bad faith — brings legitimate problems to our attention, we’ll look into them and respond appropriately.”

Good! There’s an incompatibility in the Times story and the Sulzberger memo: On one hand, there’s an attempt to tar the motivations of the “loose network of conservative operatives”; on the other, there’s a stubborn admission that they have brought actionable information to public attention. For decades now, representatives of the mainstream media have answered conservative critiques by imploring: Judge us by the work we produce, not by the fact that more than 90 percent of us are liberal/Democratic. Mainstreamers cannot have it both ways. Cut the idle and unverifiable talk about motivations. If the tweets presented by the “loose network of conservative operatives” are racist or anti-Semitic or otherwise problematic, take action. If they’re nonsensical distractions, ignore them.

In the meantime, the “loose network of conservative operatives” must be celebrating right about now, having triggered not only an extensive scolding in the Times, but also an eight-paragraph memo from its publisher.

He’s exactly right. All the frothing Sulzberger did on “bad faith” is just bullsh** and excuse-making. The allegations are either real or they aren’t. Their validity is not affected one whit whether they are brought to you privately to alert you to a problem or trumpeted across the internet to make you look hypocritical and rather stupid. Reporters having to live by the rules they have created, which is that a notation in a high school yearbook could result in a demand for your firing thirty years after the fact, is a very good thing.

The thing that struck me here was the rather gleeful tone. It’s almost as if reporters talk and they know which of their colleagues have posted stuff which would be, in the left’s vernacular, “problematic” if brought to light. The group working on this project claim “that the operation had unearthed potentially “fireable” information on “several hundred” people.” The subtext here, in my reading, is that there is some really bad stuff floating around that is common knowledge but that no one in the industry has done anything about because their first loyalty is to their group and ratting out a fellow journalist would get you blackballed. The whole “bring in on” attitude also makes it seem like that the writer thinks the New York Times is going to be uniquely stricken by the outbreak of truth that is about to happen. We can only hope.

The New York Times:

A loose network of conservative operatives allied with the White House is pursuing what they say will be an aggressive operation to discredit news organizations deemed hostile to President Trump by publicizing damaging information about journalists.

It is the latest step in a long-running effort by Mr. Trump and his allies to undercut the influence of legitimate news reporting. Four people familiar with the operation described how it works, asserting that it has compiled dossiers of potentially embarrassing social media posts and other public statements by hundreds of people who work at some of the country’s most prominent news organizations.

The group has already released information about journalists at CNN, The Washington Post and The New York Times — three outlets that have aggressively investigated Mr. Trump — in response to reporting or commentary that the White House’s allies consider unfair to Mr. Trump and his team or harmful to his re-election prospects.

Operatives have closely examined more than a decade’s worth of public posts and statements by journalists, the people familiar with the operation said. Only a fraction of what the network claims to have uncovered has been made public, the people said, with more to be disclosed as the 2020 election heats up. The research is said to extend to members of journalists’ families who are active in politics, as well as liberal activists and other political opponents of the president.

It is not possible to independently assess the claims about the quantity or potential significance of the material the pro-Trump network has assembled. Some involved in the operation have histories of bluster and exaggeration. And those willing to describe its techniques and goals may be trying to intimidate journalists or their employers.

But the material publicized so far, while in some cases stripped of context or presented in misleading ways, has proved authentic, and much of it has been professionally harmful to its targets.

It is clear from the cases to date that among the central players in the operation is Arthur Schwartz, a combative 47-year-old conservative consultant who is a friend and informal adviser to Donald Trump Jr., the president’s eldest son. Mr. Schwartz has worked with some of the right’s most aggressive operatives, including the former Trump adviser Stephen K. Bannon.

“If the @nytimes thinks this settles the matter we can expose a few of their other bigots,” Mr. Schwartz tweeted on Thursday in response to an apologetic tweet from a Times journalist whose anti-Semitic social media posts had just been revealed by the operation. “Lots more where this came from.”

The information unearthed by the operation has been commented on and spread by officials inside the Trump administration and re-election campaign, as well as conservative activists and right-wing news outlets such as Breitbart News. In the case of the Times editor, the news was first published by Breitbart, immediately amplified on Twitter by Donald Trump Jr. and, among others, Katrina Pierson, a senior adviser to the Trump campaign, and quickly became the subject of a Breitbart interview with Stephanie Grisham, the White House press secretary and communications director.

The White House press office said that neither the president nor anyone in the White House was involved in or aware of the operation, and that neither the White House nor the Republican National Committee was involved in funding it.

The Trump campaign said it was unaware of, and not involved in, the effort, but suggested that it served a worthy purpose. “We know nothing about this, but it’s clear that the media has a lot of work to do to clean up its own house,” said Tim Murtaugh, the campaign’s communications director.

The campaign is consistent with Mr. Trump’s long-running effort to delegitimize critical reporting and brand the news media as an “enemy of the people.” The president has relentlessly sought to diminish the credibility of news organizations and cast them as politically motivated opponents.

Journalism, he said in a tweet last week, is “nothing more than an evil propaganda machine for the Democrat Party.”

The operation has compiled social media posts from Twitter, Facebook and Instagram, and stored images of the posts that can be publicized even if the user deletes them, said the people familiar with the effort. One claimed that the operation had unearthed potentially “fireable” information on “several hundred” people.

“I am sure there will be more scalps,” said Sam Nunberg, a former aide to Mr. Trump who is a friend of Mr. Schwartz.

Mr. Nunberg and others who are familiar with the campaign described it as meant to expose what they see as the hypocrisy of mainstream news outlets that have reported on the president’s inflammatory language regarding race.

“Two can play at this game,” he said. “The media has long targeted Republicans with deep dives into their social media, looking to caricature all conservatives and Trump voters as racists.”

But using journalistic techniques to target journalists and news organizations as retribution for — or as a warning not to pursue — coverage critical of the president is fundamentally different from the well-established role of the news media in scrutinizing people in positions of power.

“If it’s clearly retaliatory, it’s clearly an attack, it’s clearly not journalism,” said Leonard Downie Jr., who was the executive editor of The Post from 1991 to 2008. Tension between a president and the news media that covers him is nothing new, Mr. Downie added. But an organized, wide-scale political effort to intentionally humiliate journalists and others who work for media outlets is.

“It’s one thing for Spiro Agnew to call everyone in the press ‘nattering nabobs of negativism,’” he said, referring to the former vice president’s famous critique of how journalists covered President Richard M. Nixon. “And another thing to investigate individuals in order to embarrass them publicly and jeopardize their employment.”

A. G. Sulzberger, the publisher of The Times, said in a statement that such tactics were taking the president’s campaign against a free press to a new level.

“They are seeking to harass and embarrass anyone affiliated with the leading news organizations that are asking tough questions and bringing uncomfortable truths to light,” Mr. Sulzberger said. “The goal of this campaign is clearly to intimidate journalists from doing their job, which includes serving as a check on power and exposing wrongdoing when it occurs. The Times will not be intimidated or silenced.”

In a statement, a CNN spokesman said that when government officials, “and those working on their behalf, threaten and retaliate against reporters as a means of suppression, it’s a clear abandonment of democracy for something very dangerous.”

The operation is targeting the news media by using one of the most effective weapons of political combat — deep and laborious research into the public records of opponents to find contradictions, controversial opinions or toxic affiliations. The liberal group Media Matters for America helped pioneer close scrutiny of public statements by conservative media personalities.

The conservative operative James O’Keefe has twisted that concept in ways inconsistent with traditional journalistic ethics, using false identities, elaborate cover stories and undercover videos to entrap journalists and publicize embarrassing statements, often in misleading ways, to undercut the credibility of what he considers news media biased in favor of liberals.

In the case of the pro-Trump network, research into journalists is being deployed for the political benefit of the White House. It is targeting not only high-profile journalists who challenge the administration, but also anyone who works for any news organization that members of the network see as hostile to Mr. Trump, no matter how tangential that job may be to the coverage of his presidency. And it is being used explicitly as retribution for coverage.

Some reporters have been warned that they or their news organizations could be targets, creating the impression that the campaign intended in part to deter them from aggressive coverage as well as to inflict punishment after an article has been published.

Trained as a lawyer, Mr. Schwartz has endeared himself to members of the president’s family by becoming one of their most aggressive defenders, known for badgering and threatening reporters and others he believes have wronged the Trumps.

He has publicly gone after Republicans he views as disloyal, including the former White House chief of staff Reince Priebus, about whom he admitted spreading an unsubstantiated rumor. He has called himself a “troll on Twitter,” which is where he has boasted of being aware of, or having access to, damaging information on dozens of journalists at CNN and The Times that could be deployed if those outlets ran afoul of Mr. Trump or his allies.

The operation’s tactics were on display last week, seemingly in response to two pieces in The Times that angered Mr. Trump’s allies. The paper’s editorial board published an editorial on Wednesday accusing Mr. Trump of fomenting anti-Semitism, and the newsroom published a profile on Thursday morning of Ms. Grisham, the new White House press secretary, which included unflattering details about her employment history.

One person involved in the effort said the pro-Trump forces, aware ahead of time about the coverage of Ms. Grisham, were prepared to respond. Early Thursday morning, soon after the profile appeared online, Breitbart News published an article that documented anti-Semitic and racist tweets written a decade ago by Tom Wright-Piersanti, who was in college at the time and has since become an editor on the Times’ politics desk. The Times said it was reviewing the matter and considered the posts “a clear violation of our standards.”

Mr. Schwartz tweeted a link to the Breitbart piece before 7 a.m., which Donald Trump Jr. retweeted to his 3.8 million followers — the first of about two dozen times that the president’s son shared the article or its contents. Other prominent Republicans, including Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, joined in highlighting the report.

Breitbart’s article quoted several people or groups with close ties to Mr. Schwartz, including Richard Grenell, Mr. Trump’s ambassador to Germany, and the Zionist Organization of America. It was written by the site’s Washington political editor, Matthew Boyle, whose relationship with Mr. Schwartz started when Mr. Bannon ran the website.

Mr. Boyle’s article included a reference to the Times profile of Ms. Grisham, which it characterized as “attacking White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham.” Mr. Wright-Piersanti was uninvolved in the editing of the article about Ms. Grisham.

The tweets revealed in the Breitbart article quickly spread to other conservative outlets favored by the president and his allies, including the radio shows of Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin.

Mr. Wright-Piersanti apologized on Twitteron Thursday morning and deleted offensive tweets. Mr. Schwartz then issued his warning that he had further damaging information about Times employees.

Mr. Wright-Piersanti, 32, said the tweets, posted when he was a college student with a Twitter following consisting mostly of personal acquaintances, were “my lame attempts at edgy humor to try to get a rise out of my friends.”

But he said “they’re not funny, they’re clearly offensive,” adding, “I feel deep shame for them, and I am truly, honestly sorry that I wrote these.”

He said he had forgotten about the tweets as he started a career in journalism.

“For my generation, the generation that came of age in the internet, all the youthful mistakes that you made get preserved in digital amber, and no matter how much you change and mature and grow up, it’s always out there, waiting to be discovered,” Mr. Wright-Piersanti said.

Like Mr. Wright-Piersanti, other targets of the pro-Trump network have been young people who grew up with social media and wrote the posts in question when they were in their teens or early 20s, in most cases before they became professional journalists.

A week after a White House reporter for CNN sparred with Mr. Trump during a news conference, Mr. Schwartz highlighted a tweet by the reporter from 2011, when the reporter was in college, that used an anti-gay slur. Other similar tweets quickly surfaced, and the reporter apologized, though Mr. Schwartz has continued to antagonize the reporter on Twitter.

In recent months, Mr. Schwartz highlighted a nearly decade-old tweet in which a reporter for The Post had repeated in an ambiguous manner a slur used by a politician.

In March, Mr. Schwartz tweeted a link to an article from Breitbart, written by Mr. Boyle, about a reporter from Business Insider whose Instagram account included anti-Trump references and a photograph of the reporter demonstrating against the president.

In July, around the time CNN published an article exposing old posts by a Trump appointee spreading suggestions that Barack Obama was a Muslim whose loyalty to the United States was in question, Mr. Schwartz resurfaced anti-Semitic tweets from 2011 by a CNN photo editor. Mr. Schwartz suggested that a CNN reporter who specializes in unearthing problematic archival content should “look into the social media activities of your employees.”

The tweets became the basis for several articles in conservative news outlets and hundreds of tweets from conservatives targeting the photo editor, Mohammed Elshamy, which did not stop even after he resigned under pressure from CNN and apologized.

“It felt like a coordinated attack,” said Mr. Elshamy, who said he had received death threats. “It was overwhelming.”

Mr. Elshamy, who is now 25, said he posted the tweets when he was 15 and 16 years old, growing up in Egypt, when he was still learning English and did not fully grasp the meaning of the words.

“I was repeating slogans heard on the streets during a highly emotional time in my nation’s history,” he said. “I believe that my subsequent work and views over the years redeems for the mistakes I made as a kid.”

While he said he understands “the severity and harm of my comments,” he questioned the motivation of the campaign that cost him his job. “It is a very dirty tactic that they are using to cause as much harm as they can to anyone who is affiliated with these media outlets,” he said. “It actually feels like a competition and every termination or vilification is a point for them.”

Mr. Bannon, at the time the head of Breitbart, oversaw the site’s efforts in 2015 to attack Megyn Kelly, then of Fox News, after she called out Mr. Trump for tweets disparaging women as “fat pigs,” “dogs” and “slobs.” In an interview, he said the work that Mr. Schwartz was undertaking should be seen as a sign that Mr. Trump’s supporters were committed to executing a frontal assault on news media they considered adversarial.

“A culture war is a war,” he said. “There are casualties in war. And that’s what you’re seeing.”

On one level, this is a national version of what conservative activists in Wisconsin did by exposing employees of state media companies who signed petitions for the recall election of Gov. Scott Walker in 2012. Ballot petitions, whether for candidates or referenda, are public records in this state, as everyone who didn’t know that (including embarrassingly some journalists) found out.

Now journalists are being exposed for communications in social media, which everyone should know isn’t private either, and of publicly made statements made in places where people have no expectation of privacy. The fear is that journalists who make disparaging comments about Trump and other Republicans to what they might think is a private audience will have their credibility impugned, meaning that their own political views and their inability to be objective about their work will be exposed.

The reaction to this in the media will be fascinating to watch. Everyone in the media who criticizes this effort will expose themselves as hypocrites on openness as members of the only constitutionally protected occupation in this country, regardless of the campaign’s obvious motivations. (And by the way, this is Think F1rst month, as you know.) Social media is simply not private. And anyone who works in the media should realize that you cannot say one thing and then pretend you didn’t say it any more than you can unprint something.

(If journalists are forbidden by their employers to express opinions on their work-provided social media accounts, that may be the best thing that happens. As you know, the First Amendment covers government, not the private sector.)

On the other hand, this raises an issue in our Gotcha! culture of whether a statute of limitations should exist on social media, as the story of Wright-Piersanti’s and Elshamy’s tweets illustrate. Decency should not hold adults necessarily accountable for an ill-advised, though not illegal, statement a child makes. This is also obviously an attack on journalists’ First Amendment rights as private citizens outside of their work. (Of course, Trump believes in his own First Amendment rights but not his opponents.)

The theory of this campaign is that what you say is who you are. The assumption the campaign is making is that there won’t be any significant blowback against conservatives because the media is, in their opinion, an anti-conservative world. The additional assumption is that a journalist cannot be simultaneously critical of and objective about someone he or she covers.

More on this possibly tomorrow.