The
Internet has given us many glorious things: streaming movies,
multiplayer games, real-time information and videos of cats playing the
piano. It has also offered up some less edifying creations: web-borne
viruses, cybercrime and Charles C. Johnson.
His
name came out of nowhere and now seems to be everywhere. When the
consumer Internet first unfolded, there was much talk about millions of
new voices blooming. Mr. Johnson is one of those flowers. His tactics
may have as much in common with ultimate fighting as journalism, but
that doesn’t mean he is not part of the conversation.
Mr. Johnson, a 26-year-old blogger based in California, has worked his way to the white-hot center of the controversy over a Rolling Stone article
about rape accusations made by a student at the University of Virginia.
His instinct that the report was deeply flawed was correct, but he
proceeded to threaten on Twitter to expose the student and then later
named her. And he serially printed her photo while going after her in
personal and public ways.
In
the frenzy to discredit her, he published a Facebook photo of someone
he said was the same woman at a rally protesting an earlier rape. Oops.
Different person. He did correct himself, but the damage, now to two
different women, was done.
Before
that, his targets were two reporters for The New York Times who, he
said, revealed the address of the police officer in the Ferguson, Mo.,
shooting. (They didn’t. They published the name of a street he once
lived on, which had already been published in The Washington Post and
other media outlets.) Before that, he attacked the victim of the
shooting, Michael Brown.
Before
that, he attacked Senator Cory Booker, saying the lawmaker did not live
in Newark when he was the city’s mayor; BuzzFeed wrote that Mr. Johnson
not only was wrong, but had worked
for a political action committee that opposed Mr. Booker. He also wrote
a series of Twitter messages that suggested President Obama was gay. He
offered money for photos of Senator Thad Cochran’s wife in her nursing
home bed. Before that, well, it doesn’t really matter; you get the
pattern.
He is not without some talent — he effectively ended the career
of the rising foreign policy analyst Elizabeth O’Bagy after exposing
her conflicts of interest and fudged academic credentials. In general,
he has a knack for staking an outrageous, attacking position on a
prominent news event, then pounding away until he is noticed. It is one
way to go, one that says everything about the corrosive, underreported
news era we are living through.
In
a phone call, he made it clear that he sees himself as part of the
vanguard of Internet news, although he did add that some of what he is
up to is a response to a lifetime of slights.
“I’m basically one of those kids who was bullied all his life,” he said. He’s now extracting payback, one post at a time.
Much of what he publishes is either wrong or tasteless,
but that matters little to Mr. Johnson or his audience, which responds
by forming mobs on Twitter or using the personal information to put fake
ads on Craigslist to chase after the targets he points to.
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After
watching him set off a series of small mushroom clouds, it struck me
that he might be the ultimate expression of a certain kind of citizen
journalism — one far more toxic than we’re accustomed to seeing. Once a
promising young conservative voice who wrote for The Wall Street
Journal, The Weekly Standard, The Daily Caller and The Blaze, Mr.
Johnson has a loose-cannon approach that alienated many of his editors.
There was a time when that would have been the end of it, but with
Twitter as a promotional platform, he has been able to build his own
site called GotNews.
His
most vociferous critics are on the right because they think his
outrageous tactics bring disrepute to the conservative cause. But many —
like the studios in Hollywood who have stood by watching the
cyberattack on Sony unfold without emitting a peep — do not want to
speak on the record for fear they will end up in his gun sights. (One
exception was a Daily Caller contributor, Matt K. Lewis, who called out The Washington Post for what he characterized as a “romanticizing” profile of Mr. Johnson.)
On
Thursday, Mr. Johnson told me he was going to sue many of his media
tormentors, but all considered, it has been a pretty good run of
attention for the once obscure blogger. When I spoke to him, he was
feeling a bit hunted and fighting off a cold, but cheerful in the main,
saying his grandiose plans to become the next Matt Drudge — or Joseph
Pulitzer or William Randolph Hearst, two others he mentioned — were
humming along smoothly.
“I’m
in talks with investors right now, and I think we’ve already got the
deal set up,” he said. “Basically I’m building a crowd-sourced,
crowd-funded media company that is going to take all the people like me —
autistics, researchers, nerds, ex-law enforcement, whistle-blowers —
and we’re going to give them an opportunity to make money on the
information that they have.”
He
can now push the button on almost anything that has heat, a scent of
scandal or the ability to activate his base of angry, conspiratorial
readers, who believe the republic is being overwhelmed by criminals,
feminists and the politicians who enable them. And then the rest of the
journalistic establishment — including me — points a crooked finger at
the naughty young man who is using his mouse to sow mayhem.
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