MSNBC Segment on Online Harassment and Gender Misses The Mark

On Taylor Lorenz, online harassment, and centering the most privileged.

MSNBC’s Meet the Press Daily aired a segment from NBC News Correspondent Morgan Radford on gender-based harassment against women journalists, featuring an interview with the Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz alongside The 19th LGBTQ+ Reporter Kate Sosin. While Sosin is non-binary – that isn’t mentioned in the segment – all the language about online harassment in the segment  is explicitly stated to be against “female” and “women” journalists. That gives you a pretty clear picture of the veracity of this segment within itself, but for more focus on the problematic reliance on gendered language throughout journalism, I’ll point you to this article in The Objective by Liana DeMasi.

Understanding, of course, that covering the issue of online harassment of media workers online cannot really be well conveyed in any four-minute segment, there were many other underlying issues from the jump. The segment almost entirely focuses on Taylor Lorenz and this “new” research, which first came out in January. It shows violent rhetoric directed at Lorenz dramatically increased after Tucker Carlson attacked her on Fox News in February, as did another Carlson segment about WIRED columnist Virginia Heffernan. They also showed data from NYU researchers detailing how the digital harassment increased even more after what they call “one Twitter thread” from a “male media figure.” The thread they’re referring to is one by none other than Glenn Greenwald, who wrote a thread about Lorenz in August over Lorenz’s criticism of Greenwald’s association with the “free speech” social platform Rumble. Screenshots of Greenwald’s “criticism” of Lorenz appear on-screen to viewers for less than two seconds, but a bizarro-world statement from him claiming “no journalist” should “want… some special immunity shield” is included at the end. 

During the segment, Lorenz begins to cry and says, “I have severe PTSD from this [harassment]… It’s so isolating… it’s horrifying, it’s overwhelming, it’s very hard.” Unsurprisingly, once that clip went online, that moment became nothing but encouragement for the very people the segment sought to talk about (but did very little of, anyway).

Even host Chuck Todd’s response immediately after the taped portion of the segment ended was dismal: “Folks who live online know exactly what they’re doing.” Well, apparently the people at Meet the Press Daily didn’t know what they were doing, because all they did was just tee up Lorenz, Sosin, and a number of other journalists up for a complete weekend of shitty subtweeting and veiled disparaging Substack article that we’ve begun to accept as “discourse.” Unsurprisingly, in doing so, they covered little revelatory information about the issue of online harassment, and how it affects women and LGBTQ+ people.

This is a stunning failure by all involved. First, Kate Sosin is an exceptional reporter with more than 10 years of experience, and at a time when over 200 anti-LGBTQ bills exist across the country – with a trans non-binary person who is a journalist reporting on these issues right in front of them – MSNBC *still* managed to completely ignore or remove anything not explicitly about “women.” The Meet the Press social media, ironically, had to take to Twitter to note “for clarification” that Sosin is non-binary. They deserved better, and several people in the industry shared those sentiments.

Which brings us to Lorenz – how she has been treated over the last year should not be minimized, at all – and, trying to act as if any of this is “new” and simply originates from Fox News, or even Glenn Greenwald, is a swing, a miss, and a twisted ankle. It’s like when people tried to anoint Kim Kardashian the face of criminal justice reform: you’re years late – and uninformed – on the issue and most of all, aren’t actually doing anything to protect or even support the people who went through hell and did the work for you to even know about this issue at all. This did not. Instead, it basically was served fresh on a platter for Greenwald, Carlson & Co. to keep this going, continually antagonizing everyone who dares to speak on the topic at all in the process. I’m sure Greenwald will go on a three-tweet rant about this characterization alone if he ever comes across it.

Even if we grant that mainstream media just can’t help but center the most privileged in the room (white national reporters with huge platforms, in this case), MSNBC and others had little interest in the issue when Emily Wilder became the subject of Republican Senators and college teenagers’ (successful) effort to ostracize her because she made tweets that weren’t the most friendly to the Israeli state apparatus. It cost her a job she had just started at the Associated Press, and even the AP’s own coverage of her treatment (and that of Lorenz and others) runs circles around this segment’s elementary coverage of the events.

If you’re going to ignore the scores of non-white people who have experienced this first hand (Seung Min Kim, Lorenz’s Post colleague and a woman of color, was also targeted by Carlson around the same time, yet…) and the work many of them did to prevent this (the #YourSlipIsShowing campaign predated all of this by years) while doing little to point the attention at the people of influence who typically lead this harassment to happen (Shaun King, Dave Portnoy, Talib Kweli), you could at least get a comprehensive picture of the exact situation you’re choosing to zero in on. 

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