This should surprise no one:
A little more than a month after he lost his job at BuzzFeed for widespread plagiarism, Benny Johnson has landed on his feet at National Review.
Politico’s Mike Allen reported Saturday that Johnson will begin his work as social media director at the conservative outlet next week.
The role and the venue both make sense for Johnson.
As the viral politics editor at BuzzFeed, Johnson was tasked with producing clicky posts on topics such as George H.W. Bush’s sock preferences and John McCain’s “adorable” first mention of Twitter on the Senate floor.
Before joining the viral media giant in late-2012, Johnson worked in conservative media, writing for the likes of The Blaze and Breitbart.
His work at those outlets and at BuzzFeed made Johnson a frequent target of mockery from many of his peers in the online journalism community. The criticism came to a head in July, when a pair of pseudonymous Twitter users known as @blippoblappo and @crushingbort detailed multiple instances of plagiarism in Johnson’s posts on BuzzFeed.
In his initial response to the plagiarism allegations, BuzzFeed editor-in-chief Ben Smith offered now-infamous praise of Johnson.
“Benny Johnson is one of the web’s deeply original writers, as is clear from his body of work,” Smith told Gawker.
All you can do is laugh.
Hungry Joe
“All you can do is laugh”? I have to disagree: One can also plotz.
Comrade Dread
Well, trading some of the more overtly racists of their writers for a plagiarist is actually an infinitesimally small step up for National Review.
If they stay on this fast track, then maybe one day in the year 501,014, when most of humanity has evolved into energy and the hated Zorkians have subjugated the remnants of our species and converted them to their religion involving rude hand gestures, the National Review will actually perform a useful act of journalism.
ruemara
I’d like to be able to fail up.
shelley
People write for Breitbert? Thought it was all ” ‘insert noun here’ is all Obama’s fault.”
gnomedad
@shelley:
I keep thinking that, more and more, right-wing “commentary” consists primarily of non sequiturs and mad-libs, e.g., Obama’s army of Muslim refugee kids carrying Ebola.
shelley
And saw over at NewsMax. Poor Issa’s screaming for attention again. ‘IRS ! IRS!’ With all that’s new going on in the news, guess he’s feeling neglected.
Baud
@ruemara:
Me too. God knows I try.
gnomedad
@gnomedad:
Fox’s Erick Erickson: Obama Wants To Put “Pregnant Female Soldiers On The Front Lines”
See?
shelley
Ah, don’t you love it when Conspiracies collide?
The same people who are freaking about all those disease-laden refugees are probably the types who refuse to get their own kids vaccinated.
shelley
@gnomedad: Back in the days when they were trying to pass the Equal Rights Amendment, Erickson would have been one of those idiots screaming about unisex bathrooms.
gnomedad
@shelley:
Doesn’t just happen; the Teahadis have their own Supercollider.
Baud
@gnomedad:
Abortion by ISIS, paid for by Obamacare.
Ingenious.
scav
that “web’s deeply original writers” judgement so obviously shines a light on the speaker, that which is spoken of (both of them) and the context / culture in which all of them swim. A monument to the utter irrelevance of self-awareness or logical thought to the production of linguistically coherent verbiage.
jayboat
@scav:
Ideology trumps all in their world. Plus, he’s kinda cute, and under 50… so, win-win.
WereBear
If I had gone for the journalism degree back in the early ’80’s, I would be despairing and unemployed now, so a post like this would have been personally devastating instead of just culturally depressing.
Happy to know I made a least one good decision in the past.
(Law school got scuppered when one of my profs said, “But you don’t like people telling you how to think about things,” and subsequent conversation led to me deciding it would be three years of mental hell.)
Botsplainer
Intriguing material – it confirms a theory of mine that moribund improvement for the middle class is related to what I call “the revenge of the risk managers and underwriters”. The result is the stifling of modest consumer and commercial credit lines, and in an era of low inflation (a rate not high enough to justify wage increases, but enough to erode living standards of the bottom two quintiles), is absolutely increasing inequality and holding back the economy.
http://confoundedinterest.wordpress.com/2014/09/07/broken-transmission-bank-credit-as-percentage-of-monetary-base-hits-all-time-low-explains-poor-mortgage-growth/
MattF
@shelley: I think what’s happened is that Congress is back in town.
Bobby B.
The Corporation takes care of its own.
Villago Delenda Est
This, my friends, is a stellar example of what a very bad joke the “meritocracy” of the United States is.
Villago Delenda Est
@Botsplainer: I’m starting to believe that these assholes really want their day on the Place de la Concorde.
Villago Delenda Est
@shelley:
Yes. The evil of the unisex bathroom. They are in every home in this country, that’s how much the evil has spread.
The horror, the horror.
Villago Delenda Est
@Comrade Dread: Optimist.
maya
I lurve Elton J’s Benny and the Gops.
Shakezula
He’ll stand athwart original writing yelling “Stop!”
Frankly I’d rather have all those lampreys feeding off the same host so I call this a win.
Mike G
Another example of the soft bigotry of low expectations in the wingnutosphere.
If you’re a “made man” you can only fail upwards — as long as you maintain ideological obedience.
Botsplainer
@Villago Delenda Est:
In the 1860s, Erickson would have been of the position that slavery was the natural disposition of the negro.
In 1948, he’d have been a “segregation forever” Strom Thurmond Dixiecrat.
In the 1950s, Erickson would have proclaimed integration to be communism.
He’d have supported Bull Connor’s war against outside agitators and helped clear out lunch counters.
He’d have quietly accepted the Birmingham church bombing and Philadelphia MS murders, voting to acquit if he was on the jury.
He’d have resented the Civil Rights Act as “rushing things” and “tyrannically forcing people”.
He’d have been horrified by the Loving ruling.
Conservative thought has never been right.
Roger Moore
@ruemara:
Change your political philosophy, and you’ll be in great position to do so. I suspect a black woman spouting the drek the Republicans want to hear, especially about race and gender, would never be far from a job.
Ruckus
@Roger Moore:
She’s far too sane to be able to hold a job like that. Or even get it in the first place.
Bill E Pilgrim
Unprofessional and often ridiculed by real journalists and other bloggers – strong negative.
Writing riddled with plagiarized passages – big minus.
Pissed off lots of liberals — priceless. You’re hired.
WereBear
@Ruckus: Yep. Helps to have a high tolerance for self-loathing.
muddy
@WereBear: Self-loathing is not something sociopaths have trouble with. The people I know like that always seem so pleased with themselves.
rikyrah
Pennsylvania mother who gave daughter abortion pill gets prison
By David DeKok
HARRISBURG Pa. Sat Sep 6, 2014 12:24pm EDT
A Pennsylvania woman has been sentenced to up to 18 months in prison for obtaining so-called abortion pills online and providing them to her teenage daughter to end her pregnancy.
Jennifer Ann Whalen, 39, of Washingtonville, a single mother who works as a nursing home aide, pleaded guilty in August to obtaining the miscarriage-inducing pills from an online site in Europe for her daughter, 16, who did not want to have the child.
Whalen was sentenced on Friday by Montour County Court of Common Pleas Judge Gary Norton to serve 12 months to 18 months in prison for violating a state law that requires abortions to be performed by physicians.
She was also fined $1,000 and ordered to perform 40 hours of community service after her release. The felony offense called for up to seven years in prison and a $15,000 fine.
Matthew Bingham Banks, Whalen’s lawyer, previously told Reuters criminal prosecutions of this kind were not common.
Whalen told authorities there was no local clinic available to perform an abortion and her daughter did not have health insurance to cover a hospital abortion, the Press Enterprise newspaper of Bloomsburg reported.
Her daughter experienced severe cramping and bleeding after taking the pills and Whalen took her to a hospital hear her home for treatment, the newspaper said.
The closest abortion clinic to Whalen’s home is about 74 miles away in Harrisburg.
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/09/06/us-usa-crime-pennsylvania-abortion-idUSKBN0H10IR20140906
GHayduke (formerly lojasmo)
Ben Smith: The primary reason I always felt Politico was a bag of shit. Of course, there were a multitude of reasons, ultimately.
WaterGirl
@rikyrah: Make it harder and harder to get an abortion, particularly if you are poor, and then put women in prison for taking some desperate measure. America. We’re #1.
Mnemosyne
Well, I finished writing my new blog post, but I can’t post it until G gets home because all of the MP4 files of the movies are on his computer and I need to make a clip for the post. Sigh. Probably time to go run some errands.
Tehanu
It never ceases to amaze me that people a quarter my age (early boomer) are still squirming out of the woodwork to spout conservative crapola. I assume their parents and grandparents indoctrinated them, but I don’t really understand how the p’s and grandp’s managed to keep on believing in spite of the evidence piliing up throughout their — our! — lives that conservatism is basically bigotry, selfishness and greed dressed up as realism.
Roger Moore
@Tehanu:
It’s very simple; movement conservatism is about ignoring reality in favor of ideology. Evidence that contradicts their political beliefs is explained away or ignored.
Villago Delenda Est
@Botsplainer: If he were in Paris in 1789, he’d be an early tumbrel rider.
Villago Delenda Est
@Roger Moore: They always imagine an idealized past that never existed.
Shakezula
@Tehanu: I wouldn’t assume they see those things as negatives.
LosGatosCA
@Shakezula:
No dressing up required.
What doesn’t kill them unarmed in the street, or dying due to lack of health care, or starving for scraps when the unemployment/food stamps makes them stronger to help pay taxes to finance tax cuts for the rich. That’s character building and it’s all for their own good.