Sep 26, 2009 03:15 PM
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Tue Feb 9
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So: Michael Jackson, Lady Gaga, Tucker Carlson. What do the three previous posts have in common? None of 'em are nearly as much fun as watching a conservative policy group play the press cycle over a "Jewboy" "email" from NBC.
The story so far: conservative policy group Americans for Limited Government sent out an email blast. NBC and Stone say that Stone wrote the following email back:
From: Stone, Jane (NBC Universal)
Sent: Thursday, September 24, 2009 1:57 PM
To: 'arosenwald@getliberty.org'
Subject: Re: ALG Calls on Congress to "Put Up or Shut Up" on Defunding ACORNTake me off this list!
—————————————
Sent from my BlackBerry Wireless Handheld
Right? Who hasn't sent back a pissed off "UNSUBSCRIBE!" to an email chain letter, their mother, or the New York Observer's Very Short List? So Stone doesn't feel like putting up with the shit that comes in her Inbox anymore, and as someone with an email address who works at a news website, I feel her pain:
And that's moderate. The shitty releases we get in our respective inboxes can't stop, won't stop. Sometimes, I want to tell the world UNSUBSCRIBE, but I can't, so I usually just delete them. But Stone was fed up with this kind of shit, and fired something off as such. So how does ALG respond? By contacting media outlets and letting them know that Stone wrote them back the following email:
Let's get this straight:
1. A conservative policy group got rebuffed by a bigtime news producer at a network which—because it's not Fox News—commonly receives a designation from conservatives as "liberal."
2. Why would Stone—a producer at NBC News—resort to Anti-Semitic slurs? How would she know that its sender were Jewish? His last name is "Rosenwald," but still: persecution complex, much?
3. Americans for Limited Government is a small fish policy group looking to attract attention.
4. Why would NBC be so quick to respond to accusations if they weren't substantiated with bullshit? They have tech guys working around the clock. They could easily reproduce the email from the back-end on a moment's command. Which they did—as evidenced above—and provided to Politico the following statement:
Americans for Limited Government has chosen to launch an outrageous, reckless attack and smear campaign against an NBC News employee. Faced with irrefutable evidence that our employee did nothing more than ask to be removed from an email mailing list, the organization has maliciously published a fabricated email.
Our employee never sent any such email.. She is completely innocent of the outrageous charges and is being used by an organization to make a self-serving point. This is a shameless, hateful and defaming act which should be roundly denounced.
In other words, ALG's completely full of shit, and they did this to get into a news cycle. So who bit?
Michael Caldrone played this as a news story and didn't provide much perspective, so call it "reporting," but really: kind of like a pussy.
This kind of thing was made for conservative blogs—where they get their fundraising bread and butter—so, of course, guys like this:
Exit question: Will the liztards at Little Green Gulag blame this on 1) Glenn Beck, 2) Robert Stacey McCain, 3) the entire conservative blogosphere, or 4) All the above?
Mediabistro's lede is a question:
Did an NBC News producer really respond to an email from the group Americans for Limited Government with, "Bite Me Jew Boy" or did she write, "Take me off this list!"?
Mean Megan McArdle at the Atlantic thinks it's ridiculous, but also, strangely plausible:
It's so bizarre that I simply can't believe that an NBC producer did this. But it's also so bizarre that it's not actually all that much more plausible that Americans for Limited Government made the thing up. It's not like they're playing to the common stereotype that the television world is hostile to Jews.
Zeke Turner at Mediaite runs with a big headline:
‘Bite Me Jew Boy' Email Starts War of Words Between NBC and Right-Wing Think Tank
But gets the ball through the goalposts:
The he said–she said can only go on so long. Both sides should trot out their evidence now that this has become public and Stone's reputation is on the line. In the meantime, ALG has gotten some serious face time from a major news company. But will all the buzz turn into embarrassment once the case is closed on ‘Bite me Jew Boy'?
Yes. Turner's right about one thing: there will be embarrassment, but mostly, for people who think this was anything but a complete crock.
Update: My commenters are, as often is the case, crazy, and crazy on top of their shit. Baroness points out that the founder of AFG had a fawning profile front-and-center in the New York Times today. Also, Dragonhorse asks why the name on the email sent and the name on the return were different (and also asserts the cliched nature of the slur). And Mediaite's Anthony DeRosa asks ALG for their header. Teamwork!
Send an email to Foster Kamer, the author of this post, at foster@gawker.com.
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