There is a good reason that using the power of mass media to expose individual citizens' private lives to abuse and threats is considered unethical: It represents unchecked and abusive power. No one interested in holding the public trust should either want or seek it.
Yet this, of course, is exactly what Malkin did this week in publishing, on her blog, the home phone numbers of three students who led anti-military protests on the campus of UC-Santa Cruz.
Predictably, the students were deluged with hate mail and phone calls, including a number of death threats.
Malkin not only refused to take the numbers down -- in response, she reverted to her timeworn victimization schtick, posting some of the nasty e-mails she received in return and pretending there was nothing wrong or unethical in her behavior.
We're all too familiar with this routine. After all, it's what the entirety of her book Unhinged was predicated upon. Malkin, as I said then, is like the lunatic who walks around the public square and pokes people in the eye with a sharp stick, and then is shocked, shocked, that anyone would respond with anger and outrage.
This is not at all unlike something Ann Coulter did once, despite the fact that she too has a vagina...
1 comment:
Regarding how this all started, Michelle Malkin went to a cached page, took a screenshot, and posted the image on her site because didn't like the politics of the people. It's not her place to justify the disclosing of this information because she deemed that they were terrorizing people. That's an issue for the Santa Cruz police department to deal with, not her own brand of vigilante justice.
As for her own personal details - Malkin included that on her own e-mail list and that's how it went public. She launched her personal information about herself BY herself.
And the anti-racist One People's Project website promptly released her new details.
Someone took it a step further and used live.windows.com and yahoo maps to do a Graphic.
Payback's a bitch eh' Malkin?
Her refusal to remove these kids contact information was not from conviction, but from revenue. Every journalist in the world knows that contact information on a press release is for journalists to call for more information or interviews, not to be published (or even pointed out) in the publication itself. If she were any kind of ethical person she would have pulled the information when asked.
If she were something resembling a human being with "feelings", she would not have republished the information once the students themselves removed it. Michelle is a vicious, vindictive, venomous egoist with no discernible ethics nor even a shred of human decency. If she wants to be The Minority Woman Who Believes Minorities and Women Suck, that's her right. But she should at least have the integrity to acknowledge that she has done wrong and to stop compounding the wrong. And she should not give us that disingenuous crap about how she doesn't condone death threats and nobody should misuse her posting and reposting of personal information.
Post a Comment