Stupid is as Stupid Tweets

I’m sure most of you are familiar with the horrible attack on the reporter Lara Logan in Egypt last week. In case you missed this news, a quick recap: Logan, a 39 year old mother of two and seasoned reporter, was in Cairo reporting on the latest uprisings. She was reporting for the show 60 Minutes and had a camera crew with her. At one point, while separated from her crew and security, she was surrounded by a group of Egyptian men who beat and sexually assaulted her for 20 or 30 minutes. A group of women and around 20 Egyptian soldiers eventually rescued her.

The reaction to this horrible incident by many anonymous online commenters and some not so anonymous public personalities has been shocking. The reactions range from people blaming her for going into harm’s way to others suggesting she’s a bad mother. As Strollerderby notes, news companies like NPR and the LA Times actually had to remove some comments from their websites because the comments violated their terms of service. In other words, they were too cruel. Strollerderby looked to TMZ to find some disturbing comments that hadn’t been removed. Here’s one they quote:

“She’s [expletive] nuts as a mother to put herself with her inflated ego into such harm’s way. I don’t respect her. In fact I think she’s a reckless bad mother.”

Here’s another:

“So this was blown out of proportion…. She ran off for a night of fun…. She’s coming back for more…. Wow.”

Those are bad enough and what we might expect from online commenters. Read any site that receives high traffic and you’re sure to find insensitive virtual cowards, but did you hear about the journalist Nir Rosen, a fellow (now former) of NYU.

This guy has written for Time, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. He also has written a couple books about the Iraq War, so, in other words, he’s a real journalist. He claims he wrote these tweets before knowing the full extent of the attack. I’m not sure why this matters. He knows its dangerous over there and when the news started reporting an attack, what did he think, that she stubbed her toe? Jerk.

Rosen tried to delete his tweets upon realizing the severity of the assault, but he forgot nothing is ever really lost on the Internet. You can see the change in his attitude as he starts to receive criticism for his comments and then finally realizes his job is on the line. Note: The reference to McChrystal has to do with Logan criticizing the author of a Rolling Stone piece who printed remarks McChrystal made about the President, which eventually resulted in him being relieved of his command. This is what he tweeted, as reported by Forbes:

“lara logan had to outdo anderson. where was her buddy mccrystal?”

“she was probably just groped like thousands of other women.”

“jesus christ, at a moment when she is going to become a martyr and glorified we should at least remember her role as a major war monger”

“ah [expletive] it, i apologize for being insensitive, its always wrong, thats obvious, but i’m rolling my eyes at all the attention she will get”

“and as a result of that i hope people remember her role glorifying war and condemning rolling stone’s hastings while defending mcchrystal”

“As someone who’s devoted his career to defending victims and supporting justice, I’m very ashamed for my insensitive and offensive comments”

“on the job you get used to making jokes about our own death, other people’s deaths, horrors, you forget that you sound like a [kinda expletive] at home”

“to the 500 people new twitter followers and the old ones. I did not mean it and i apologize again. it was an inappropriate unaccetable joke”

But his apology was too late for the twitter world. Under pressure from NYU, he resigned his fellowship. I’m not sure which tweet was the unacceptable joke to which he refers. And I’m not sure he realizes that he sounds like a jerk (not the word he used) at home AND among his peers. This isn’t a case of we the general public just can’t understand the black humor of a journalist. No Rosen, we get it, but I’m not sure you do.

Maybe twitter has made us more callous as a culture because we can respond publicly to something without knowing the facts, or, maybe, and more likely, Rosen is like a lot of other people, who upon hearing about violence against women, first question, then criticize, then blame, all the while forgetting that none of those are a good first reaction, whether you know the specific details of the assault or not. Rosen, stupid is as stupid tweets.