Hospital ‘Evacuation’ Hoax: WaPo Blames ‘Libs of TikTok’ for Another Taylor Lorenz ‘Mistake’
“WaPo published an article claiming a hospital was evacuated. No hospital was evacuated. When I questioned them about this lie they blamed me for not doing their work for them.” – Libs of TikTok’
In her short time at the newspaper, Washington Post technology reporter Taylor Lorenz has gone after the popular “Libs of TikTok” (LoTT) Twitter account in (by my count) three separate stories, with perhaps the most infamous one being the one where Lorenz doxxed LoTT back in April in part by knocking on the doors of family members in an effort to get more information she thought she could use to smear and shut down the person behind the account, Chaya Raichik.
The other two were in September, first in a piece from earlier this month alleging that the LoTT Twitter account was being “blamed for [the] harassment of children’s hospitals” after the hospitals claimed they’d received harassing phone calls and threats after video tweets she posted over the summer which detailed the type of disturbing “care” kids and teenagers who purportedly claim to be transgender allegedly receive at such facilities.
The byline on that piece included Lorenz, and fellow WaPo reporters Elizabeth Dwoskin and Peter Jamison. As it turns out, Dwoskin returned alongside colleague Jeremy Merrill for another hit piece earlier this week on right-leaning social media influencers including Raichik. While Lorenz was not listed as one of the authors of that story, she was listed at the bottom as a “contributor” and did play a role in some of the information that was shared in the story, including a claim that some of LoTT’s tweets on Boston Children’s Hospital “led to … a bomb [that] threat caused the hospital to be evacuated.”
Here’s what their original report looked like (emphasis mine):
Meanwhile, several among the 77 have retweeted Chaya Raichik to their large audiences, helping fuel the meteoric rise of her Twitter account, Libs of TikTok. The account, which soared from fewer than 1,000 followers in early 2021 to 1.3 million today, criticizes teachers, medical providers and others who serve transgender children and teens. It was recently suspended after a post led to death threats against providers at Boston Children’s Hospital, and a bomb threat caused the hospital to be evacuated.
The problem with that last part, however, is that the hospital in fact was not evacuated, as Raichik pointed out to Dwoskin in a direct message on Twitter. Incredibly, though Dwoskin acknowledged the error and noted it would be corrected on the website, she actually blamed Raichik for not correcting Lorenz, who was the one who earlier had reached out to Raichik to ask her for comment on the story prior to publication and who had “mistakenly” (according to Dwoskin) included the “evacuated” language in her message to Raichik.
Raichik shared a screengrab of the exchange with Dwoskin to her Twitter account (click on the image below in the first tweet to see the full exchange), also noting in follow-up tweets how this was “Yet another @washingtonpost piece that Taylor Lorenz contributed to that now requires a correction…” and how the paper updated their story to note that the hospital had gone on lockdown with access restricted in response to the alleged threat but had not been evacuated:
WaPo published an article claiming a hospital was evacuated. No hospital was evacuated. When I questioned them about this lie they blamed me for not doing their work for them. You can’t make this up. Journalism! pic.twitter.com/qLHGiC1pva
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) September 22, 2022
Yet another @washingtonpost piece that Taylor Lorenz contributed to that now requires a correction…
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) September 22, 2022
.@washingtonpost finally updated their article after they lied about me and blamed me for not being their editor and correcting their lie before publishing. Btw @JeffBezos– I’m not looking for a job!
Before and after pic.twitter.com/SWmQG6To7F
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) September 22, 2022
Afterward, the question about why the WaPo would keep Lorenz on staff was raised:
for real, though. what is WaPo’s greatest argument in favor of keeping this walking retraction/correction machine on its payroll?
— T. Becket Adams (@BecketAdams) September 22, 2022
One can only conclude from the Washington Post‘s pathetic defenses and continued support of Lorenz including allowing her to continually lie about and misreport on Libs of TikTok (whether on the WaPo website or on her Twitter feed) that they’re perfectly okay with Lorenz continuing to embarrass the paper provided she keeps Libs of TikTok’s Twitter activities on the radars of Very Online Leftists and deliberately misframing those activities in such a way as to suggest LoTT is a dangerous threat to civilized society or something.
In reality, LoTT is a very potent ideological threat to wokeness—woke educators and woke medical professionals, to be exact, which is precisely why left-wing journos like Lorenz and the hacks at Media Matters so often go after the account and those like it. Conservative influencers who can’t be controlled nor scared into silence must be canceled, in their view, because they dare to express WrongThink.
So far, the attacks on the LoTT account are only fueling Raichik’s desire to keep exposing radical leftists in the public and private education systems and in the medical profession all the more. That is good news for fans of her Twitter account, and bad news for those who seek to intimidate her into silence.
— Stacey Matthews has also written under the pseudonym “Sister Toldjah” and can be reached via Twitter. —
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Comments
Hm… WaPo crossed the line into malice yet? If not, they’re very close.
The question isn’t if they are showing and acting on actual malice. That’s a given. The question is, can it be proved in court? Probably not.
“Actual malice” in defamation law does not mean what the words say. It is a term of art that means the defendant published something defamatory, knowing that it was not true, or else seriously suspecting that it might not be true and not caring. A simple mistake of fact is not “actual malice”, no matter how much the defendant hates the plaintiff.
It’s true that newspaper editors don’t tend to do fact checking. They have their hands full correcting the horrific spelling and grammar produced by professional journalists. (At least, that’s the way it was when I worked at a newspaper, quite a few years back)
But that doesn’t mean no one at the paper is responsible for factual accuracy. They don’t want to be sued (too often) for wild exaggerations and malicious lies, after all.
The problem is that ideology has become more important than little things like the truth. Truth, after all, is the first casualty of war. Even when that war is being waged by an aggressive political force against a largely unsuspecting enemy.
They keep her in payroll because, as they say in show biz,” any publicity is good publicity”, and WaPo needs all the publicity it can get.
IDK, maybe they are simply afraid of the reaction to firing from Lorenz. She seems like the kind of aging Karen who would create a scene. Bunnies in the pot, blood sacrifice, random acts of intimidation, screaming at the sky and so on. Cheaper to keep her IOW.
Stormy Daniels, without the balcony.
So why do they keep her on?
NYT called Stormy Daniels “A Feminist Hero.”
Welcome to Bizarro World, your passport please.
She gives off a kind of Captain Ahab vibe …
In today’s America, being lazy and sloppy like Taylor Lorenz is not a sufficient reason to fire any female. Holding Lorenz to any standard would be evidence of existence of the white male patriarchy, which is known to be very oppressive to women and people of color. As one of the oppressed, Taylor Lorenz is allowed to have her own version of the truth, and to express it.
You laugh, but… here, another toxic sister has made a movie about poor, poor Taylor. The first thing she does in the trailer is complain about how many people “make up shit” about her!
The lefitsts taking projection to a whole new level.
Just kidding.
Outstanding. Alinsky Rules can and should be used against the Left. Ridicule away! It’s actually kind of fun.
Thank you Chaya Raichik, for the pioneering work. And the courage. Bravo!
RULE 6: “A good tactic is one your people enjoy.”
She literally reposts things that leftists themselves have posted. How exactly is that fomenting hate and being responsible for threats against them?
And that’s what burns the libs most of all. Especially the ones at Twitter.
Someone outed the abortion chambers? The Mengele clinics? There are precedents.
New masthead: “Democracy Dies in Mendacity.”
Pravda on the Potomac where the truth goes to die in darkness