The Media Research Center absolutely despises Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz for her tech-related reporting — specifically, that she exposed Chaya Raichik as the proprietor of the virulently hate-filled Libs of TikTok Twitter/X feed. Thus, the MRC goes into freakout mode whenever she pops up. P.J. Gladnick ranted in a Feb. 12 post:
Professional kvetchmeister Taylor Lorenz of the Washington Post is once again whining about any hint of the social-media giants moving away from censorship or aggressively recommending “mainstream” media reports with a leftist agenda.
In this case, Taylor and her Post colleague Naomi Nix are over the news that Meta (which everyone still calls Facebook) has decided to stop proactively recommending political content on Instagram or their Twitter-knockoff called Threads. Most people would greet the news that Meta is not shoving its biases down people’s throats via recommendations to be a good thing. But not Taylor Lorenz as you can see in Saturday’s whine encased in an article, “Meta turns its back on politics again, angering some news creators.”
Which “creators” are worried about “a crucial election year”? The Left, which cannot be identified.
[…]When you see the term “right-wing” in a story about social media that is a good tell that the person using it is as hostile to any relaxation of censorship as Taylor Lorenz who is notorious for melting down over any hint of what she considers to be an intolerable breath of freedom.
Yeah, it can’t possibly be that “right-wing” is the most accurate descriptor, not that Gladnick offers an alternative. He also refused to explain why right-wingers (like himself) should not be properly and accurately identified.
When Lorenz did an interview with Raichik, Alex Christy spent a Feb. 24 post cherry-picking it to make Lorenz look bad and Raichik look good:
Washington Post technology and online culture columnist and chief woketeer Taylor Lorenz published a 53-minute interview with 2023 MRC Bulldog Award winner Chaya Raichik—A.K.A. Libs of TikTok—to her YouTube account on Saturday, where she compared a woman getting a nose job to getting her breasts cut off under the rationale that she’s really a boy and admitted she’s unfamiliar with the sexually explicit books Raichik is trying to “ban” from schools, among several other things.
At the 3:30 mark, a mask-clad Lorenz asks Raichik if she is responsible for the hateful comments that get posted in response to her Twitter posts, “I know you have a very conservative fan base, and in your comments sometimes, you’ll see a lot of commentary about, sort of, the Great Replacement Theory. What are your thoughts—what are your thoughts on that?”
Raichik answered Lorenz’s question with a question of her own, “What are your thoughts on the comments on your post telling me to kill myself?”
Lorenz said such comments were horrible, but didn’t seem to get that Raichick was trying to get Lorenz to apply her own standard to herself, “So are you saying that, like, somebody posts something then attacks follow, that person should answer for those attacks?”
Raichik replied, “No, that’s not what I’m saying. People like you tell me that all the time, so I’m just asking you if you think the same thing.
[…]At 8:50 on the subject of books, Lorenz asked, “I was just curious, how many have you read?” Raichik replied that she’s read Gender Queer, This Book is Gay, Flamer, My Shadow is Pink, It Feels Good to be Yourself, and “so many more.”
Several minutes later, at the 44:25 mark, Lorenz could not say the same, “I have not read those books, so I don’t know, but I do think that it’s important to educate kids about sexuality.”
At one point, Raichik showed both Lorenz and the camera the oral sex cartoons in question, to which Lorenz claimed that context matters and Raichik countered that there is no context in which such images are appropriate to show children.
[…]Back at 26:25, Lorenz was wondering what Raichik has against transgenders. If transitioning makes people happy, what’s the big deal, she wondered. She also wondered, “What would happen to them?” if Raichik succeeded in her mission against transgender ideology.
For Raichik, it is a matter of truth, “First of all, the whole trans—it’s based on a lie. You can’t change—you can’t change your gender.”
As someone who writes for the paper that claims democracy dies in darkness, Lorenz should know that truth, for its own sake, matters. No matter how many times Lorenz claims that chopping off a young girl’s breasts is the same as a nose job is the same thing, it will never be true.
If “truth, for its own sake, matters,” why does the MRC despise Lorenz for reporting the truth about Raichik? Meanwhile, a less biased observer noted about the interview:
Lorenz does a superb job in her 53-minute interview with Raichik, who clearly had trouble keeping up with Lorenz’s questions, which were direct without being confrontational. Despite Raichik’s answers, which often came off as those you might hear from a petulant teenager, Lorenz pressed forward and was always ready with the next follow-up.
The Daily Beast’s Brooke Leigh Howard called it a “painful, agonizing interview” in which “Raichik seemingly expressed a belief in the Great Replacement Theory and blasted ‘wokeness,’ said that transgenderism is ‘based on lies and nonsense,’ and gave her take on removing books from public school libraries — a move that she vehemently claimed is not a book ban.”
Christy is not going to acknowledge Raichik’s right-wing extremism. He also failed to point out Raichik’s hostility toward her interviewer by wearing a T-shirt with a right-wing meme image of Lorenz crying; Lorenz wasn’t thrown off by Raichik’s nastiness: “I was like, ‘Uh, OK, that’s funny.” The less-biased observer added:
But the joke was on Raichik, who didn’t show any of the charisma that influencers typically have.
Podcaster, writer and activist Jordan Uhl tweeted, “If you’re going to show up to an interview wearing a shirt with the reporter’s face on it to try & troll them, you should at least be prepared to answer relatively straightforward questions about a set of ideas you’ve built your entire online persona around. Incredible faceplant.”
Joseph Vazquez returned to Lorenz’s comments about news being promoted on social media accounts in an April 24 post:
The Washington Post’s in-house cry-bully Taylor Lorenz apparently only seems to care about Big Tech when its policies affect leftists’ ability to spread their off-the-rails agitprop all over the social media landscape.
Meta announced Feb. 9 that it would be limiting all political content recommended writ large to its user bases on Instagram and Threads. This apparently struck a nerve with Lorenz, who jumped on the news with a Feb. 10 piece of her own lambasting the move as “angering some news creators” who were “gearing up for a crucial election year.” Talk about projection.
Lorenz is apparently still miffed, as her Apr. 10 piece regurgitated the bellyaching of leftist “content creators” pleading for Meta and its subsidiary Instagram in an open letter to “reverse” course, despite it being a neutral policy that affects everyone, both left and right-leaning content creators. The letter was spearheaded by the radical LGBTQ group GLAAD — a drag-queen-shows-for-kids apologist organization — and the anti-free speech leftist group Accountable Tech, which has deep ties to the Democratic Party, which Lorenz failed to disclose.
Vazquez illustrated his post with the same image of a crying Lorenz that was on Raichik’s T-shirt — a sure sign he cares only about partisan smear jobs and petulantly lashing out at anyone who doesn’t agree with him … and that he’s happy to see the censorship of political content that doesn’t jibe with his right-wing extremism.