Yahoo! writer Hope Schreiber made the site’s front page with her Thursday contribution to the controversy over Sarah Jeong, the New York Times’ new editorial board member covering technology, with a long history of racist anti-white tweets (and harsh jabs at her new colleagues at the Times).
It’s clear from the headline that Yahoo! considers the whole thing a right-wing hit-job against Jeong: “Right-wing websites target New York Times' new writer over what they call 'anti-white' tweets.” Here’s the Yahoo headline as it appeared in the tab for the story: “Alt-right targets journalist over ‘anti-white’ tweets.” Notice that only one description gets the scare quotes, a clue that the headline writer thinks the phrase doesn’t really apply.
Among Jeong’s greatest Twitter “hits”:
From December 2014: “Are white people genetically predisposed to burn faster in the sun, thus logically being only fit to live underground like groveling goblins.”
From November 2014: “Dumbass f–king white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants.”
From July 2014: “Oh man, it’s kind of sick how much joy I get out of being cruel to old white men.”
Schreiber wrote:
Writer Sarah Jeong joined the New York Times on Wednesday as the lead technology writer for the paper’s editorial board. Following the hiring, right-wing publications such as National Review and the Federalist and alt-right Twitter users scoured through Jeong’s Twitter feed and dug up what they call racist and anti-white tweets from 2013 to early 2015.
That timeline is dubious, given that the offensive tweets first circulated in Reddit and on Twitter itself before being picked up by other outlets.
Schreiber tried to soften a race-based tweet that mocked white people for their skin tone.
In a 2014 tweet, Jeong likened white people to “groveling goblins.” (Though, to be fair, it was in the context of speculating whether they were predisposed to sunburn and thus needing to seek shelter underground from the sun.) Also in 2014, she tweeted about “white people marking up the internet with their opinions like dogs pissing on fire hydrants.”
Jeong is a young woman in an industry, tech, that is made up mostly of white males, and she has often been the target of racist and sexist comments online. In an Aug. 2 statement on Twitter, she wrote, “I engaged in what I thought of at the time as counter-trolling. While it was intended as satire, I deeply regret that I mimicked the language of my harassers. These comments were not aimed at a general audience, because general audiences do not engage in harassment campaigns.” She included two examples of the harassment.
The Yahoo reporter quoted the Times’ defensive statement, which basically blamed others for Jeong’s own anti-white tweets, adding:
Many other journalists also stood up for Jeong.
Schreiber padded her piece with supportive tweets from the left-wing media universe, including The Verge, Jeong’s former journalistic home. While Jeong’s critics were given the hostile ideological labels and smeared as “alt-right,” her obviously liberal journalistic defenders needed no label besides “journalists.”
The media has defined “alt-right” as racist and violent, so lumping the “alt-right” in with mainstream conservative publications that have called out Jeong’s tweets for racism amounts to a slur.
