The left realizes that the fearless Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker is becoming
a serious threat as the right’s potential presidential candidate. So, true to
their politics of personal destruction, the leftist media has united in a
full-on pre-emptive assault to take Walker down. That included a blatant lie
about the governor’s effort to conceal the reporting of campus rapes.
Last Friday Jezebel, a politics-and-pop-culture website replete with
vicious and foulmouthed radical feminists, posted an attack on Walker written
by “senior reporter” Natasha Vargas-Cooper. Vargas-Cooper is no novice to pop
culture journalism, though she apparently doesn’t feel bound by any Old School
journalistic standards of factuality and objectivity (and why should she? The mainstream
media long ago decided that the aim of journalists should be, not fair and
balanced reportage, but social justice activism). The daughter of leftist
journalist Marc Cooper, her writing has been featured in all the usual media outlets from The New York Times and The Atlantic Monthly to HuffPost and
Salon.
Her short article, straightforwardly titled “Scott Walker Wants Colleges to Stop Reporting
Sexual Assaults,” claimed
that his proposed state budget “has a non-fiscal bombshell tucked in
between its insane pages”:
Under Walker's budget, universities would no
longer have to report the number of sexual assaults that take place on a campus
to the Department of Justice. Under Walker's plan, university employees who
witness a sexual assault would no longer have to report it.
There are no policy recommendations in
Walker's budget how or what would replace these reporting mechanisms. The
Governor simply instructs that they should be deleted.
Vargas-Cooper went on in a weak attempt to belittle Walker as “a
small-time guy who is having a big-time moment by playing the conservative
werewolf, a role Chris Christie and Jeb Bush are so far unwilling to play in
their presidential bids.” She sneered at him as bearing the “CONSERVATIVE
STRONG MAN card” – which is precisely the reason the left fears him so much:
they recognize that Walker isn’t a soft RINO who can be counted on to roll over
for them once he is in office, like the current Republican leadership.
Jezebel’s perpetually hate-spewing readership swallowed this false
accusation whole and, in the comments section, responded predictably with
head-exploding outrage, casual obscenities, and animated graphics called gifs
in lieu of literate thought (“I can only express myself via gif” wrote one female commenter, which is no doubt true of her and much of the rest of
Jezebel’s readers).
However, to paraphrase Vargas-Cooper herself, there was a non-factual
bombshell missing from her article’s insane paragraphs: Walker neither wanted
nor instructed the state university system to stop reporting sexual assaults. As
noted by USA Today, it was the
University of Wisconsin itself that asked Walker to delete a requirement that
all 26 campuses report sex assault allegations to the state every year, because
it already submits similar information to the federal government as well as
posting that information on its website. USA
Today also reported that Walker’s spokesperson confirmed that “protecting
victims of domestic violence and sexual assault remains a top priority for the
governor.”
But the left never apologizes and never plays defense (take heed, conservatives).
So rather than Vargas-Cooper acknowledging the damning revelation about Walker and
posting a retraction, she initially let the libelous headline stand and merely
added an “UPDATE.” The original piece too remained unchanged, but at the
bottom, Jezebel vaguely clarified that Walker was not at fault. Since the
headline still reads as if Walker is waging a war on women, this is the newspaper
equivalent of burying a retraction on page 17.
As reported at Newsbusters, The
Daily Beast initially ran
with the smear, as did blogger Ana Marie Cox, who later took down her tweet about Walker being “terrified of campus rape stats
getting out.” The Feministing website declared that “With a swipe of the ‘delete’ key,” Walker “has eliminated
efforts to combat campus rape from the state budget.” The progressive mouthpiece
Rawstory repeated the false charge as well. Madison’s local progressive paper Capitol Times slyly wrote, “Does Scott Walker want colleges to stop reporting sexual assaults?
It's not that simple.” Yes it is – the answer is no, but Jezebel and its
cohorts in the media would rather not be bothered to acknowledge that because
it’s more useful to spread the hateful lie that Walker is pro-rape.
Called out on Twitter about her hit piece, Vargas-Cooper dug in her heels
with this begrudging bit of belligerence: “Ran an update on the Walker piece. Find
another thing to be outraged about sweet, sweet Walkerites.” When Twitterites
took her to task for this juvenile, bullying unprofessionalism, she doubled down: “Also, I'm not gonna apologize for
reporting what was in the budget. Because that was in the budget. Ask your gov.
to apologize for bad optix.” Right, it was in the budget – never mind that she
lied about the entire context surrounding it and refused to apologize for it. The
damage was already done, so for her it was “Mission Accomplished.”
But in light of the USA Today
story, and after intense browbeating on social media, where conservatives
actually have a voice, Jezebel finally issued another “update” – not described as a retraction – in which they announced that “We reported
this piece without full context, and while this piece conveys factual information,
omission of that context for that information presents an unfair and misleading
picture. We regret the error and apologize.” The original headline smearing
Walker still stands, however.
In the wake of that reluctant
apology, the Daily Beast came out with a full-blown retraction blaming
Jezebel but hinting that there were still problems with the sexual assault
reporting requirement in Walker’s budget. At least they changed the headline to
“Walker Unfairly Attacked on College Rape - ORIGINAL STORY RETRACTED.”
Finally, Vargas-Cooper herself
broke down and admitted fault in a series of Twitter messages: “I realize now
that it would have been worth a follow up phone call to Walker's office… So,
you guys, Walker folk and media pundits alike, I screwed up… I know I said I
wasn't going to say sorry but I hope you won't fault me for changing my mind.”
Welcome to the wonderful world of progressive journalism, where angry
radicals in the guise of journalists don’t even bother pretending to care about
the truth until they’re taken to task for it on social media. All that matters to
the left is the total destruction of the target – in this instance, the
Conservative Strong Man that progressives fear the most.
(This article originally appeared here on FrontPage Magazine, 3/2/15)
