Help! Am I a Journalist or a Liberal Shill?

By Anthony Mariani, Fort Worth Weekly

I’m refusing to retract an erroneous retweet mostly out of spite, even though I know it could cost me my credibility – and my job.


One month. That was about how long I toyed around with Twitter in the mid-aughts before I realized I’m not a celebrity with 100K followers and that no one cares what I think. Oddly but not surprisingly miffed at the lack of love to come my way after I busted out the gate tweeting gold, pure gold, and intrigued by that other burgeoning social network, I bailed on the dumb blue bird. In early 2017, I picked it back up, motivated by the once distant but now clear and present prospect of another civil war. I wanted to know what was going on now and what I could do to fight back or help. Most of that thumb-work has amounted to retweet, donate, heart, heart, retweet, donate, retweet …

The other day, for the first time (that I’m aware of), I retweeted some misinformation. It was a list of all the schools where AR-15s have been used to commit massacres –– with one exception. The last name was Santa Fe High School.

“Wrong,” a pseudonymous user pointed out. The Texas murderer did not have an AR-15 but a “shotgun and a revolver,” which, as I would later discover, was true.

But I was consumed with fire and fury. You’re missing the point, I clapped back. No one needs an AR-15. They’re for one thing and one thing only: snuffing lots of lives fast. “End of discussion,” I boomed, hanging onto the moral high ground by my fingertips. To me, the context was more important than the pesky details. Besides, who was this Trumpster –– and to take issue with such trivia, he could only be a card-carrying Deplorable –– latching onto what could have been merely a typo when every other word out of his dear leader’s toxic Big Mac-hole is untrue?

Read more: https://www.fwweekly.com/2018/08/15/help-am-i-a-journalist-or-a-liberal-shill/