These Tweets Are Exactly Why People Don’t Trust Our Institutions

A number of recent controversies are sparking debates over whether media and academia still know how to uphold professional standards. (New York Post)

Exhibit A: Former Washington Post and New York Times reporter Taylor Lorenz appeared to rationalize the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in a social media post to X/Twitter alternative BlueSky.

• Lorenz, reacting to reports Blue Cross Blue Shield would stop fully covering anesthesia for some surgeries, wrote: “And people wonder why we want these executives dead.”

• In another post, Lorenz shared the name and photo of Blue Cross Blue Shield’s CEO.

• She also shared another BlueSky user’s post, which said: “Hypothetically, would it be considered an actionable threat to start emailing other insurance CEOs a simple ‘you’re next’? Completely unrelated to current events btw.”

Exhibit B: Cambridge University academic Ally Louks was widely mocked last week after she tweeted about her PhD thesis on the “politics of smell in contemporary prose,” which offered an “intersectional and wide-ranging study of olfactory oppression by establishing the underlying logics that facilitate smell’s application in creating and subverting gender, class, sexual, racial and species power structures.”

These are just recent examples: You don’t have to search long to find people at top institutions making outrageous and absurd statements.

• During an interview with CBS News in 2020, New York Times reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones argued that destroying property “is not violence.”

• In 2018, past blog posts from MSNBC host Joy Reid were uncovered which contained inflammatory content, including homophobia, 9/11 conspiracy theories and an image of Sen. John McCain photoshopped onto the body of the Virginia Tech mass shooter.

• Rutgers University professor Brittney Cooper has a history of making incendiary statements, including once saying “white people are committed to being villains.”

• Last year, the Washington Free Beacon reported that a number of top media outlets — including the Associated Press and CNN — had worked with a Hamas-linked photojournalist.

Zoom out: Trust in major institutions, including media and higher education, has fallen sharply.

Bubba’s Two Cents

Lorenz has been acting pretty unhinged, and it’s wild to think both of the country’s top newspapers until recently gave her such an elevated platform. You want to understand why people don’t trust our institutions? Start by looking at the people they’re hiring.