Saturday’s PBS News Hour accused conservatives of doxxing the ghouls who celebrated the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA. The criticism came up in a conversation between substitute host/reporter Lisa Desjardins and PBS's dubious extremism expert Cynthia Miller-Idriss, the far-left director of American University's Polarization and Extremism Research and Innovation Lab (PERIL).
Congressional reporter Lisa Desjardins: One thing I've noticed in the past few days is a rise in conservatives doxxing or publishing the personal information of people — individuals who are not remotely famous, who may have in some cases celebrated the death of Charlie Kirk. As you said, that's something obviously deplorable to do. But some — in some cases, maybe not gone that far, just offended some folks. We spoke to someone from Wired magazine who's covering this, talking about specifically this moment.
David Gilbert, Wired: I've spoken to multiple people this week who have had, you know, their employment terminated as a result of what they posted online. In some cases, they were celebrating Charlie Kirk's death. In other cases, it was much, much less than that. And they were just making points about divisive U.S. society.
Lisa Desjardins: This has been not just about shaming people, but about affecting their lives. And in some case, we know there's been death threats as well. I wonder what you make of this tactic, of just something a few people are doing, but people are collecting databases to do this now.
Desjardins was likely referring to the site “Expose Charlie’s Murderers.”
Cynthia Miller-Idriss: Yeah, doxing is a very dangerous tactic from, we've seen it from the left and from the right, and what we've seen over the years is that often when someone is doxxed their personal information leaked, there have been cases where people show up at the wrong address where they used to live, let's say, and threaten a kind of innocent family who lives there…..
But the News Hour had quite a different attitude toward another group of “doxxers” – the lefty “sedition hunters” who hunted down Trump fans who entered the capitol during the January 6 riot, who were actually touted as “citizen investigators” by PBS: "How citizen investigators are helping the FBI track down Jan. 6 rioters." (Idriss also appeared in that segment as an extremist expert.)
Veteran reporter Judy Woodruff cheered on the obsessive group of leftist loners who teamed up with the media’s favorite domestic surveillance organization to turn in people who entered the U.S. Capitol building on January 6, 2021. Some "rioters" were, as the media suggests for the other side, "peaceful protesters" -- people who made the mistake of just wandering in and taking selfies.
There were no concerns about doxxing or citizen vigilantism here, with Woodruff crowing about the group's methodology.
Judy Woodruff: Sandy is today part of an informal community of dozens of ordinary Americans who came to be known as sedition hunters. Over time, they developed their own methodologies, guidelines, even a software application to keep track of every individual rioter, giving each one a pseudonym and compiling dossiers of evidence that they then turned over to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, along with the rioters' real identity.
