A professor called Bret Stephens a ‘bedbug.’ The New York Times columnist complained to the professor’s boss.
Tim Elfrink, Morgan Krakow
1 day ago
The tweet seemed harmless enough to David Karpf. The associate professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University took
a story that bedbugs had infested the New York Times newsroom as an occasion to dig at his least favorite Times writer, the conservative columnist Bret Stephens.
New York Times columnist Bret Stephens sent an email to a George Washington University professor and his provost to complain about a tweet comparing him to a "bedbug." “The bedbugs are a metaphor,”
Karpf wrote on Monday. “The bedbugs are Bret Stephens.”
The tweet got nine likes and zero retweets, Karpf said. So the professor was surprised when an email from Stephens popped a few hours later.
He noticed that his provost at GWU was copied on the email. And Stephens was furious.
Subscribe to the Post Most newsletter: Today’s most popular stories on The Washington Post
“I’m often amazed about the things supposedly decent people are prepared to say about other people — people they’ve never met — on Twitter. I think you’ve set a new standard,”
Stephens wrote. “I would welcome the opportunity for you to come to my home, meet my wife and kids, talk to us for a few minutes, and then call me a ‘bedbug’ to my face. That would take some genuine courage and intellectual integrity on your part.”
The exchange quickly went viral after Karpf posted Stephens’s full email to Twitter, leading
to waves of backlash against a columnist whose contrarian takes on climate change
and racehave prompted canceled subscriptions and
pointed questions for his editors in the past.
The professor said Stephens’s decision to email his superior at GWU with his complaints was an inappropriate attack from a writer with one of the highest-profile platforms in journalism.
“He not only thinks I should be ashamed of what I wrote, he thinks that I should also get in trouble for it,” Karpf told The Washington Post. “That’s an abuse of his power.”
In an email to The Post hours after his missive went viral, Stephens said that his message to Karpf “speaks for itself.”
But Tuesday morning, Stephens appeared on MSNBC to address the incident further.
He called the Karpf’s bedbugs tweet “dehumanizing and totally unacceptable” and said he invited Karpf to his home to see if the professor would call him a bedbug to his face — because, Stephens said, “a lot of things people say on social media aren’t the things they’re really prepared to say in one-on-one interactions.”
He also explained why he had copied the provost on the email, saying that he did not want to get Karpf in professional trouble, but that “managers should be aware of the way in which their people, their professors or journalists, interact with the rest of the world.”
“Using dehumanizing rhetoric like bedbugs or analogizing people to insects is always wrong,” Stephens said. “We can do better. We should be the people on social media that we are in real life.”
Stephens also deactivated his Twitter account on Tuesday, writing that the platform “is a sewer. It brings out the worst in humanity. I sincerely apologize for any part I’ve played in making it worse, and to anyone I’ve ever hurt.”
The message disappeared when Stephens deactivated his account, but he confirmed to The Post that he had left Twitter.
A spokesperson for the Times didn’t immediately respond to a message about the columnist’s exchange with the professor.
Earlier this month,
the Times demoted another prominent journalist, Jonathan Weisman, who formerly edited congressional coverage for the paper’s Washington bureau, after he wrote tweets criticized as racist and then emailed author and Times contributor
Roxane Gay to demand an “enormous apology” after she called him out.
On MSNBC, Stephens acknowledged that his editors at the Times pay attention to what he says and that he had been rightly called to account in the past.
Stephens has courted controversy since joining the Times in 2017 after working as deputy editorial page editor at the Wall Street Journal, where he won a Pulitzer Prize. His first column, which
critics labeled “climate-change denialism,” led some notable climate scientists
to cancel their Times subscriptions in protest.
DPST Hypocrisy
If a Conservative called a DPST pundit a "bedbug" - there would be outrage from NYT to the SF Examiner in its' shit filled street!
Doral Has Bedbugs
