“He would never make it if he was us”
Bret Stephens, a well-known conservative and frequently-controversial New York Times opinion columnist is walking away from Twitter – a social media platform highly popular with journalists – after being mocked overnight for emailing a critic who referred to him as a “bedbug.”
After news broke Monday that several floors of the New York Times offices in midtown Manhattan may have bedbugs, one professor made a joke on Twitter:
Karpf is an associate professor at George Washington University. He notes that Stephens emailed him, and even copied Karpf’s boss on the email:
Overnight, many, including many people who are members of groups who unfortunately deal daily with viciously racist, homophobic, misogynistic or other attacks – including death threats – chimed in to note that Stephens dishes out the criticism freely in his Times column, and during his frequent MSNBC appearances, but can’t seem to take one joke.
Adding fuel to their fire is that Stephens has attacked liberals who support “safe spaces” and even bragged about quitting the conservative Wall Street Journal to write for the “mostly liberal editorial page of The New York Times” in a speech later published as “Free Speech and the Necessity of Discomfort.”
Here’s a sampling from mostly Black, LGBTQ, women, and minority journalists, and others, sharing their thoughts and experiences: