Today I was excited to see a comment by Pax Dickinson on one of Scott Alexander’s posts. I’m in the camp that thinks he was shafted (my actual words were that he’s an attention whore who should have been quietly reprimanded and otherwise allowed to keep his job), and I admit to having wondered a bit what he’s up to these days.

If his comment is anything to judge by, he’s still having trouble finding steady employment. He’s also involved in some alternative media projects, one of which is GotNews.com. I’d never heard of GotNews before today – which probably shows you just how disconnected from internet politicking I’m getting (that’s a good thing!). It’s apparently the pet project of one Charles C. Johnson (please follow this link if you’re reading this close to the time it was authored, because at the time of writing it contains some Grade A USDA Certified Unintentional Hillarity) – who, according to Noah (who always puts up a new post exactly when I finally give up and stop checking, apparently!) via the NYTimes, is the bete noir of right-thinking journalists at the moment for, um, reasons.

What reasons?

That’s the crucial question. All else equal, I’d like to donate to something like GotNews.com, because I’m quite concerned that public discourse in the US is getting increasingly personal and thugish, and unlike, say, Ken White, I think that’s a free speech issue too. But I also feel pretty strongly that we shouldn’t fight that particular fire with fire, so I need to know what kind of person Charles Johnson is before I hit his tip jar.

After reading through the Times bit, I think I’ve decided that even though its accusations are largely unfounded, I’m unwilling to call Charles C. Johnson an ally just yet. I won’t be donating to his news site, but I don’t mind frisking the Times article for unfairness, now that I’ve read it and everything.

Mr. Johnson, a 26-year-old blogger based in California, has worked his way to the white-hot center of the controversy over a Rolling Stone article about rape accusations made by a student at the University of Virginia. His instinct that the report was deeply flawed was correct, but he proceeded to threaten on Twitter to expose the student and then later named her. And he serially printed her photo while going after her in personal and public ways.

All else equal, I would find that reprehensible. In this case, I don’t necessarily, simply because we’re forgetting that this woman’s completely unfounded accusations, on which Rolling Stone declined to due diligence before printing, resulted in the entire Greek system at UVa – not even just the fraternity so accused – being shut down. To the best of my knowledge, they continue to be on suspension for an incident which everyone now knows can’t have happened the way it was presented, if indeed anything happened at all. It’s fine to say that Mr. Johnson should be more sensitive to the fact that this woman may well be mentally unstable, and may have been taken advantage of by Rolling Stone. It’s been pointed out that trauma victims typically misremember important things, so the fact that absolutely all the details of her story are demonstrably wrong doesn’t mean that nothing happened to her (though that fact would seem indicate that the "believe women" meme definitely needs to go, implying, as it does, that rape accusations are likely to be filled with faulty details that possibly implicate the wrong people), another reason it might not be a good idea to dox her as you might a more calculated false accuser. And yet, there were lots of consequences to Rolling Stone’s story that the responsible parties haven’t made amends for. I think it’s fine to say that Johnson acted rashly in outing "Jackie," but I don’t think it’s fine to say that completely out of context, the way this Times article does. It’s basically Chomsky’s schtick when he talks about the Cold War: list all the US’ more questionable foreign policy decisions without mentioning the giant Soviet elephant standing in the living room. Doxing Jackie was a bad thing to do, but it was in response to some pretty bad behavior on the other side, and it will have helped prevent similar such bad behavior in the future.

From there, the article veers into outright deception.

Before that, his targets were two reporters for The New York Times who, he said, revealed the address of the police officer in the Ferguson, Mo., shooting. (They didn’t. They published the name of a street he once lived on, which had already been published in The Washington Post and other media outlets.)

Gotta love the "he once lived on." At the time of publication, they believed he still lived on the street, since they were writing a scoop about his recent marriage. As it turns out, he had already moved, but that’s irrelevant to the judgement call. But the best part about this is that the New York Times considers itself off the hook for publishing information that could be found out elsewhere – a defense, one notes, that Johnson could also make about outing "Jackie." So, by the Times‘ standards, it’s AOK to put out all the information someone needs to find someone whose life is known to be in danger from vigilante mobs provided that information is available elsewhere, never mind whether it’s germane to the story (as it clearly wasn’t), but it’s not ok whatever to publish the inarguably-germane-to-the-story identity of someone who caused a shitstorm by inventing a story about rape what can’t have happened the way she says. If you’re having trouble splitting these hairs and finding the blazing white moral line that separates Mr. Johnson from Times reporters, join the club.

Then there’s the cute wording here:

He is not without some talent — he effectively ended the career of the rising foreign policy analyst Elizabeth O’Bagy after exposing her conflicts of interest and fudged academic credentials. In general, he has a knack for staking an outrageous, attacking position on a prominent news event, then pounding away until he is noticed.

So, pointing out that someone whose testimony was used by two Senators and entered into the official record drumming up a case for the US getting involved in the Syria conflict, where it has already spent $1billion (i.e. more in foreign military aid money than we give to anyone but Israel), had both misrepresented her credentials and had a financial conflict of interest (i.e. stood to benefit both financially and career-wise from the US’ continued involvement with … how to put this? … morally dubious Syrian rebels) is an appropriate thing to pair with "staking an outrageous, attackig position on a prominent news even, then pounding away until he’s noticed?" Silly me, I thought investigating these kinds of things was just routine journalism.

Much of what he publishes is either wrong or tasteless, but that matters little to Mr. Johnson or his audience, which responds by forming mobs on Twitter or using the personal information to put fake ads on Craigslist to chase after the targets he points to.

There is no citation for the Craigslist thing. The best my cursory Google search turned up was a mention that Johnson prefers landing his dates through Craigslist in this Politico hit piece on him, but my search was not exhaustive. As for the rest of it, there are two links, each problematic in their own way. What Johnson publishes that’s supposedly wrong comes from a Gawker piece that calls him, without irony, the "web’s worst journalist." It apparently amounts to having fallen for an internet hoax about a New York Times (seeing at theme here?) reporter posing for Playgirl back in the Bush I years, erroneously reporting that Newark mayor Cory Booker didn’t really live in Newark, and contributing to a Daily Caller story about Senator Bob Mendez soliciting prostitutes in the Dominican Republic that turned out to be unfounded and might have been planted by the Cubans. How serious is this? Well, in the first case, Johnson publicly admitted the error. Personally, I’m not ready to write it off as a "we all make mistakes" incident, because he pointedly didn’t get the one thing that would absolutely have verified his story before hitting "publish:" a copy of the 1990 Playgirl in question. If you know the path to sure verification, you take it, amirite? And yet, neither is he completely wrong. The reporter in question did go streaking across campus at Princeton at that time, which is what led to the faked story about Playgirl that Johnson fell for. As fuck-ups go, it’s serious but not catastrophic, you might say. As for the Cory Booker story, Johnson had neighbors testifying that Booker didn’t actually live in the house in question. Booker was able to prove to everyone’s satisfaction that he’d been paying for the house all that time, but that’s not the same thing as living in it. Why does that matter? Because it’s in a rough neighborhood, and Booker was trying to buy himself some street cred. Kinda like how in Hurricane Hugo my neighborhood was among the last to get power back because the CEO of Duke Energy happened to live nearby and wanted the positive press from having put the city first. Which is great and all, but the bastard stayed in a hotel the whole time, so no, he doesn’t get credit for the technicality, and neither does Booker. The Daily Caller story counts as a black mark, sure, but "contributed to" is not the same thing as "solely responsible for," so I’ll reserve judgement until someone wants to parse out the nuances of who contributed to and was responsible for vetting what.

What Johnson publishes that’s supposedly "tasteless" is just a single Tweet insinuating that Mark Mayfield’s suicide was the result of pressure from the National Republican Senatorial Committee to drop out of the race, since he was challenging a Republican incumbent in the primary. This insinuation comes to you from the same New York Times that had no problem publishing an editorial inferring that rampant anti-government rhetoric pushed Jared Loughner over the edge into shooting Gabrielle Giffords. What’s good for the goose is just good for the goose, I guess.

From there it goes … nowhere, really. We steer into some surreal territory about Johnson being like the slime in Ghostbusters II, and then we’re back to confronting him about whether he feels bad about having doxed those two Times reporters for doxing Darren Wilson (incidentally, it wasn’t just the street address – they published his marriage certificate online, thus exposing his new bride to the same harassment he was getting; the Times did eventually redact the marriage certificate, but not the name of the street his house was on). He doesn’t, not really. But then, no one’s told me why he should.

So, to sum up, we have an article with some circumstantial evidence that Johnson might be slimy that is every bit as slimy as, if not more slimy than, he himself is accused of being.

My own scorecard. I don’t agree with the decision to out "Jackie," and that is currently a dealbreaker for me in terms of donating to his GotNews.com site. Because of that, I won’t do it. That said, I can see a defense vector for that decision, even if I don’t personally agree with it, and it’s telling to me that this Times hit piece doesn’t want to mention what it is. I don’t have any problem whatever with Johnson doxing two reporters who doxed a police officer whose life was clearly in danger. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with exposing conflicts of interest of people who testify before the Senate, and I note how incredibly smarmy it is for the New York Times, of all publications, to imply there is. And while I see some evidence that Johnson is not as thorough a fact-checker as he should be, the three cases cited were each overblown in their way (one of them – the Booker case – may not be a mistake at all). Besides, his fact-checking seems to be better than Rolling stone‘s, but no one here is accusing Rolling Stone of "sowing mayhem, one click at a time," as the title of this bit would have it. So, bad marks all around. Bad marks for Johnson, sure, but worse ones still for this New York Times expose.