You can delete this disrespectful tweet, @AnnieLinskey, but the damage was done. You must have known that Joe Biden’s late son, wife and daughter are all buried in that cemetery. You owe Joe an apology. Oh, and by the way, his legislative agenda isn’t dying—it’s being negotiated. pic.twitter.com/5kGJwDKs2c
— Jon Cooper ?? (@joncoopertweets) October 3, 2021
First time I noticed Linskey was when the Boston Globe assigned her to fangirl for Scott Brown by nipping at Elizabeth Warren’s ankles. Then the Washington Post, to their shame, recruited her (along with her coatholder, Matt Viser) to do the same job during Warren’s presidential campaign. Last ‘news’ I remember from her, she was gleefully assuming the Biden’s dog Major would be euthanized for nipping a WH staffer…
One of many… pic.twitter.com/M1rFboZnFs
— Dawn M. (@dawn_macc) October 3, 2021
"Tee hee, I'm so edgy!" pic.twitter.com/y93TY2Mb1E
— Salad Boo-ter??? (@shooter_salad) October 3, 2021
They chew ankles when that’s as high as they can reach. Just a klassy, klassy journamalist, that one.
I'm glad you deleted the tweet, but it wasn't just offensive, its entire premise is false.
What was the basis for you claiming Biden's legislative agenda is "dying"? Any rational person would look at last week as progress toward it passing.
— Matthew Chapman (@fawfulfan) October 3, 2021
I'm just here for the ratio, but as long as I have the floor, a quick question: Are you incapable of actually apologizing? The fact you deleted the tweet means you realize that it was grossly inappropriate and at a minimum you should say the words "I'm sorry."
— Ed Bott (@edbott) October 3, 2021
She’s still got the loyalty of Politico comrade-in-calumny:
@AnnieLinskey is not only a great reporter but a truly nice and generous colleague in an industry often full of egotistical jerks.
She apologized. We all make mistakes. Move on.
— Rachael Bade (@rachaelmbade) October 3, 2021
She may be very nice but her tweet revealed either that she doesn't know her subject matter (Biden) well enough to know why he visited that cemetery or that she knows but decided inflammatory language would get more clicks. Either way, move her to a different beat.
— edgery #VaccinesAreSafe #WearAMask (@edgery) October 3, 2021
subtext of all of this is these freaks don’t like that they have to go to Wilmington https://t.co/7GcQXEJTfY
— Centrist ?Madness (@CentristMadness) October 3, 2021
DANG stands for Delaware Air National Guard. Their base is a two hour drive from DC. This is what I meant about how half the reason they're mad at Biden taking their war away is because they just fucking love these vanity shots riding in a military vehiclehttps://t.co/rcoKZqJC6B
— Syndicalist Weedle Collective (@Weedledouble) October 3, 2021
And we have reached Stage 5: pic.twitter.com/H89akpBpYU
— California Dem™️ (@moonbeamvotes) October 3, 2021
It was a badly conceived and insensitive tweet. I’m sorry.
— Annie Linskey (@AnnieLinskey) October 3, 2021
Maybe he was paying his respects to your dignity.
— AntifaHat (@Popehat) October 3, 2021
mvr
That was some lot of stupidity she showed trying to be clever. Reporting should be about information that makes people smarter. But you can’t do that if you don’t know what you are talking about.
debbie
Tasteless tweet. Has she been reporting at WaPo for very long?
mvr
@mvr:
Once again missing the coveted #2 comment spot.
(And having hit post on this one I see I missed it twice.)
dmsilev
‘Not intended to cause offense’? Then what exactly was it intended to do?
Omnes Omnibus
@dmsilev: It was edgy. Duh.
dmsilev
@Omnes Omnibus: Seems that she cut herself.
Baud
There is no professionalism anymore.
Baud
@dmsilev:
Get retweeted and create buzz.
Starfish
Another Scott
She apparently thinks that Biden is just another pandering politician who doesn’t believe the things that he says about grief and family and so forth. Whatever her motivation, it shows that she doesn’t know enough about him to cover him. I agree that she should be reassigned.
Cheers,
Scott.
Baud
Oh my that chart is on point.
Baud
@Starfish:
Not everyone finds their true calling. I’m happy for DougJ.
Starfish
@Baud: It still cracks me up when people try to fight him because they think he is serious.
Baud
@Starfish:
LOL.
Ken
@Starfish: He is serious, just not in the way they think.
WaterGirl
Wow, I didn’t know her by name, but I do recall some of the turds she stepped in.
What a low-class piece of work she is. They should make her ‘coffee boy’ at the Washington Post, perhaps she could perform more appropriately there.
When did being a mean girl become an asset?
schrodingers_cat
Meanwhile in India, the son of a member of Modi’s cabinet, mowed down protesting farmers. 3 people died and several were injured
And the Indian media was focused on Shahrukh’s son arrested for doing drugs.
Bad as our media is there are depths that it hasn’t plumbed to, yet.
VOR
As the author John Scalzi said, “the failure mode of clever is asshole”. She was trying to be clever but failed.
zhena gogolia
Never heard of this person. Now she’ll return to oblivion for me.
Poe Larity
Her whole raison d’etre now is to find something even more outrageous that she doesn’t have to apologize for.
I’m glad that she can delete as much as she wants, but any spawn she has will eventually find it. Can we proactively start a gofundme for counselingfortoxicannielinkeyskids?
James E Powell
@VOR:
In the press/media, being an asshole to Democrats is a brand.
Benw
I’ve worked in several departments that let decent people leave because management wouldn’t deal with the toxic person. In each case the toxic person was described by management as nice
Lord Fartdaddy (Formerly, Mumphrey, Smedley Darlington Mingobat, et al.)
Sometimes I think about the days of yore when the Washington press wouldn’t be caught dead at parties with the people the wrote about…
Ken
@Benw: You remind me of the classic letter of recommendation where you read every other line.
NotoriousJRT
@dmsilev: such an excellent question!
Benw
@Ken: That is amazing
Jeffro
@Starfish: talk about ‘edgy’
mrmoshpotato
@Starfish: LOL! Never knew anyone thought he was serious.
Ken
@mrmoshpotato: I was going to say that half of twitter’s readers are of below-average intelligence. Then I decided there’s too much self-selection involved for a random sample, but I can’t decide which way that might tip the average.
opiejeanne
@schrodingers_cat: Is Shahrukh part of the opposition to Modi?
boatboy_srq
The stupidity and malice she displays is remarkable. It would be extreme except that we have seen the same – and worse – from the GQP these past few decades. The only distinction between her tweets and Gingrich’s speeches is that the lines have gotten short and the language less polite.
Mike E
Frances Haugen was on 60 Minutes with receipts from her time working at Facebook showing their “attempts” to regulate hate speech and deliberate misinformation are deserving of our skepticism… she recently filed numerous complaints with the Securities and Exchange Commission to examine FB’s marketing behavior, brava and good luck to her
opiejeanne
@Ken: And they’re still brighter than 50% of the people on Facebook. Honestly, I rarely go to FB these days, and only to see some people l care about. I’ve trimmed the list of people I tolerate/follow on both Facebook and Twitter so much that I rarely see the dolts any more, but they do slip through once in a while.
Ksmiami
Where’s villago when we need her/him the most?
boatboy_srq
@Baud: What Linskey does is quite professional. In the way that driving a stiletto into a mark’s side is professional. It is not noble. It is not civilized. But it’s quite professional.
Yutsano
This is an OT but I found our candidate for today’s Florida man.
rikyrah
@schrodingers_cat:
????
Chetan Murthy
@Yutsano: Floriduh man is never OT
schrodingers_cat
Update: 8 people are dead.
https://twitter.com/sanitarypanels/status/1444675010174406660/photo/1
schrodingers_cat
@opiejeanne: No just a prominent Muslim in Modi’s India.
seefleur
So as a lurker, I have to delurk to post this:
What I sent to WaPo:
What I got in response –
Thank you for writing to express your concern. Ms. Linskey, who is a fine journalist and reporter above reproach, acknowledged in deleting the tweet that it had unintentionally offended some people.
I think all we can ask of ourselves and others is that we acknowledge and own when we have caused harm, regardless of intent. That is what Ms. Linskey did; I am singularly proud to have her as a colleague.
Thank you again for reading, subscribing and for taking the time to write.
Tracy Grant
Managing Editor
The Washington Post
Sent from my iPhone
My response:
Ms. Linskey has done this before while she was working at other publications – and it reflects poorly on you that you would even use the phrase that she “unintentionally offended some people” – this is a pathetic excuse of an apology, essentially blaming the “offended” for being offended and sidelining the offender.
I won’t be renewing my sub to the WaPo – kind of a pity because their “Voracious” section has some good recipes…
Steeplejack
Annie Linskey: “The Biden’s will not euthanize their dog Major [. . .].”
Eek—the greengrocer’s apostrophe! That alone should get her sent down from the bigs, maybe to a small-market AAA penny shopper.
Kelly
Per John Scalzi: The failure mode of clever is asshole
I see VOR beat me to it
Major Major Major Major
Never heard of her. Spending way less time online has its advantages… just wrapping up my pre-TV internet, and I thought “who?” over at least a dozen outrages.
Starfish
@opiejeanne: It is so hard. A few people I know who have cancer went back to Facebook for support and community, and I think about them all the time, but I can’t do Facebook.
BC in Illinois
I am one of those who had never heard of Annie Linskey until today. And I read the Washington Post.
I used to subscribe to the NYT, until they brought the climate change-denying columnist on board. That was in 2017, and I was already unhappy because of 2016.
I have kept my subscription to the WaPo, in part for loyalty’s sake. Hell, I used to deliver the WaPo, during the Kennedy administration. A few years later, I read the Watergate coverage every morning, day by day. (Though I was mad at Carl Bernstein because he had given the Iron Butterfly a bad review.) And I have learned which columnists I avoid — G Will, K Parker, H Hewitt, etc. — and which I appreciate — E J Dionne, A Petri, E Robinson, etc.
What today’s discussion about the tweet and the non-apology has done, is teach me the name of Annie Linskey. So that when it shows up (as a contributor) to today’s article “For Democrats and the Biden agenda, it’s becoming a matter of trust,” I know not to trust it.
That’s what the Washington Post has accomplished today. I know a name not to trust.
Enhanced Voting Techniques
@Another Scott: She comes across as a dimwit who took the “Theater of Politics” literally and doesn’t get no one can be “in character” 24/7.
piratedan
@BC in Illinois: you can add her to the list with Peter Baker and Ken Vogel and damn near everyone from Politico. We’re keeping reciepts and keeping a list. Its really time to start noting who plays fair and who are partisan assassins.
Eunicecycle
@Steeplejack: I noticed that, too! Weren’t we just talking about this?
Steeplejack
@Baud:
Seconded. Much as I liked him here, he is better there. Like the opposite of Michael Jordan going from basketball to baseball.
Steeplejack
@Eunicecycle:
Yes, in the pedantry orgy a few days ago.
Lyrebird
@seefleur:
Really nicely done!
On your part I mean.
Really odious of the editor to hide behind “unintentional” blah blah blah…
zhena gogolia
@seefleur: What a horrible response. “a reporter above reproach”? Really? Who says things like that?
I guess I have to reconsider my own subscription. I never read it anyway.
jl
There was a saying from a recent decaying empire that ended in exhausted collapse. On the tip of my tongue… senior moment… Oh yeah! There is no truth in news, there is no news in truth.
The problem goes far beyond Linsky. Both the NYT and WaPo have been writing obviously false history in their news stories. For example, the NYT has been trying a sell a fabricated history where there was no deal to pass bipartisan and reconciliation bill in tandem, Biden hadn’t explicitly endorsed it, and that the battle has been between the majority of ‘moderates’ (whatever that is supposed to mean these days) and a few wild eyed impudent progressives. And the biggest lie is saved for last, that the progressives hectored Biden in SWITCHING TO A NEW POSITION in favor of passing them both in tandem. This is all completely false, and in fact the opposite of the historical record, most of which has been reported in these papers own stories.
I am not even getting into the rank and servile editorializing in supposed news stories in favor of the very greedy and ruthless corporate sector.
I think the true story is that the big corporate sector decided that they liked the all the freebies in the bipartisan bill, and had no qualms trying to muscle their soldiers (e.g., Gottheimer, Sinema, and Manchin) into reneging, or at least into very high risk political stunts to gut the reconciliation of anything the corporations don’t like.
Not sure why NYT and WaPo feel they have to play along, though I can see why other news organizations which are subsidiaries of ginormous international corporations do.
HumboldtBlue
Speaking of poisonous assholes, the oil leak off Orange County is as ugly as you’d expect.
Steeplejack
@Starfish, @Baud:
The ultimate for that is Three Year Letterman. Hilarious spoof account, and even after two or three years he still has people light into him for his youth football atrocities. At this point he has a Greek chorus that backs him up all the way.
jl
@HumboldtBlue: Thanks for the clip. That is heartbreaking, almost physically sickening to me. I didn’t know it was that bad. I think the size of the spill has been vastly underestimated in the news stories I’ve heard.
I think that area is an astonishingly beautiful coastline. Had relatives down there when I was a tyke. I loved to go visit every summer. Knew the nooks and crannies of the beaches down near my kin’s house almost by heart (probably not, but that is my memory of those times).
eddie blake
that’s… that’s just fucked up.
she should be slapped with a fish.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T8XeDvKqI4E
Steeplejack
@Steeplejack:
Case in point.
eddie blake
what really, REALLY annoys me about this is that it was just like, two weeks ago that washington was complaining that biden talked about his dead kid too much…
how could this…journalist NOT know that?
HumboldtBlue
In light of the ugly environmental news, here’s evolution in action in the reindeer tornado.
Steeplejack
@Yutsano:
Can you really be Floriduh Man if you’re doing snowbird crimes? ?
Poe Larity
@Yutsano: FL man seems to be getting around
Never assume old white jetski guy isn’t packing AR-15 with muzzle supressor, cash and heroin.
piratedan
@eddie blake: the answer is likely that she does know…. but cheap partisan snark is cheap partisan snark. She has an editor that covered her ass and states that she is above reproach and sufficiently covered her ass with the boilerplate insincerity.
Citizen Alan
@opiejeanne: I’m in FB jail again (another 20 days to go). And it’s all because my best friend in the world can’t resist trolling RW sites which then show up in my feed and draw me into the madness.
Steeplejack
@schrodingers_cat:
Disgusting.
eddie blake
@piratedan: yeah. fish-slap.
Citizen Alan
@piratedan: I can’t see the name Ken Vogel without wishing harm on the SOB. But for a heroic whistleblower, Ken Vogel would have gotten a fucking Pulitzer for blowing open “the Hunter Biden scandal” and Shitgibbon would have been reelected for another 4 years.
Steeplejack
@zhena gogolia:
But the crosswords! Can you see those without a subscription?
zhena gogolia
@Steeplejack: I’m not sure. You should be, since you have to watch an ad before every puzzle.
Kay
@Citizen Alan:
Absolutely true. I still think it’s wild that the whistleblower intervened and stopped the…. journalist.
jl
Open thread break: IMHO very interesting pot pourri garden thread this morning. Thanks, AL.
piratedan
@Citizen Alan: its why we have to keep receipts and note who the bad actors are. The other disturbing trend is that even when we call these people out… they keep failing upward and you can’t do that without support and sponsorship from on high… which tells you a LOT about how narratives are being shaped.
Steeplejack
@zhena gogolia:
I don’t see any ads, but that could be my ad blocker at work. (I do have a subscription.)
BC in Illinois
@seefleur:
As zhena gogolia has already said:
The whole response by the WaPo Managing Editor is remarkably obtuse. It shows not the slightest glimmer of self-reflection. Now, they may perhaps want to do their self-reflecting in secret, where no glimmers emerge, but this “above reproach” language gives us no reason to hope. Her reporting has been “reproached” online, all day.
I gave up the chance to read some good reporting when I cancelled the NYT. I would hate to give up the Post. But if they think they’re above reproach, then their days are numbered. (And not just to losing my paltry subscription.)
And this would be a really bad time for them to go into a swift decline.
HumboldtBlue
I hear Sinema speak and I always think of the O’Jays.
Cuz money changes ya.
jl
@BC in Illinois: Blinded by the arrogance of a powerful hack with a sinecure.
Villago Delenda Est
She’s Village vermin who deserves a tumbrel ride. Fuck these people. They are not journalists; they are stenographers and propagandists for a corrupt parasitical oligarchy.
Elizabelle
@seefleur: @BC in Illinois:
Seefleur: I think you should email the whole exchange to WaPost ombudsman Margaret Sullivan. Your incoming letter re Annie Linskey, and that incredible (as in ridiculous) response by their Managing Editor.
The WaPost has an Annie Linskey problem, and they might have a Tracy Grant problem too. Few journalists are “above reproach”, and particularly not this one, who has already had to delete a ridiculously juvenile email. Today.
The WaPost is a very good paper, but they have had some disaster hires (sadly, possibly their new Executive Editor; jury is still out there), and people promoted well beyond their competence. Remember Liz Spayd, who had a long career at the WaPost, and then was such a disaster as ombudsman at the FTF NY Times that they abolished the position. (That’s on the Times management, but Spayd was atrocious.)
Please email to [email protected]
Yutsano
@HumboldtBlue: “Reindeer Cyclone” is the name of my new ska punk band.
stinger
@Steeplejack: Yes. I’ve never had a WaPo subscription.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/crossword-puzzles/daily/?utm_term=.032f4e878ff9
HumboldtBlue
@Yutsano:
I’m playing sax.
James E Powell
Whenever the Villagers circle their wagons to defend a member’s egregious conduct, they insist that person is a great reporter. See generally, the FTFNYT defenses of Baker, Haberman, etc. Thing is, they can’t cite a single example of great reporting. Access gossip mongers are not reporters. None of them write particularly well. They repeat what Courtiers tell them to repeat.
This Linskey person is like all of them. Easily replaceable.
JustRuss
I’m really torqued by Shear’s tweet:
cain
prostratedragon
@eddie blake: Or how could someone witnessing a person visiting a cemetery in his home town church not suspect that he might have family or dear friends there, and so decide to keep her offensive trap shut? (Guess maybe I answered myself there.)
cain
@Villago Delenda Est:
This is why I don’t have a subscription to any of these newspapers. We need to stop funding these newspapers.
Fund places like pro publica (until they get bought
cain
@JustRuss:
I don’t think Biden even likes golfing. They didn’t seem to mind so much when Trump did it.
NotMax
@HumboldtBlue
Go retro cool. Wail on the ophicleide.
;)
eddie blake
@prostratedragon: right. grrr
forget a fish. hit her with whatever we have that’s bigger than the 240’s..
i’m TOTALLY down with villago.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iZGLigsqnEY
David ? ☘The Establishment☘? Koch
If she had done this “mistake” to any republican she would have been fired.
frosty
@HumboldtBlue: @Yutsano: Can a ska punk band use a slide guitar? Cause I’ve always wanted to play in a band with an awesome name like Reindeer Cyclone.
JWR
@jl: I didn’t know it was that bad.
Tonight’s NBC news said it wasn’t clear whether or not the “leak” had even been stopped, just the Coast Guard saying it had been slowed, so whatever its size, expect it to get bigger soon.
But remember: The erl! We needs all the erl!
opiejeanne
@prostratedragon: One thing that has bugged me about this from the start is that she chose to use the term “graveyard” instead of cemetery. Maybe I’m a bit sensitive about this usage, but it feels like she chose that word in order to be more offensive, since the word has more negative vibes.
Maybe that’s just me, but Gettysburg wasn’t fought in a graveyard, it was fought in a cemetery.
JWR
I hadn’t heard about this bit of good news. From 3 days ago:
Now MAGA world is calling him a Judas Goat.
Chetan Murthy
@JWR:
AHAHAHAHAHA! Glad I clicked-thru on that one! Thank you! Boy howdy, hope he gets to keep the $$, too! Though, I’d be willing to bet a drink, that he’s just distancing himself from Trump in an attempt to, y’know, keep his rank and pension on the way out. And maybe his liberty. Don’t trust his ass, for sure. But notwithstanding, it’s great to see ’em fight.
Rootin’ for injuries!
eclare
@opiejeanne: That is interesting, I had not thought about that. But you are right, graveyard implies less dignity than a cemetery. What a hit piece.
Bart
I don’t understand why the White House doesn’t just ban these ghouls from the pack. And if someone asks for a reason, just say “she knows what she did”.
But I bet all her “colleagues” will defend her and demand her re-installment. After all, they also stood up for the rightwing propagandists of FauxNoise.
Chetan Murthy
@Bart: Murc’s Law, Dermatology edition: Only GrOPers are allowed to have thin skins.
Shalimar
@Elizabelle: Sullivan was the ombudsman for the New York Times. She’s just a columnist for the Washington Post. They don’t have an ombudsman.
JWR
@James E Powell:
Damn f*cking straight! That first tweet above is atrocious, really bottom of the barrel stuff. As a boss once said to me after being on the phone with some auto repair shop for far too long, “sometimes you wonder how people even have jobs.” Same goes for this Linskey “journalist”.
Shalimar
repeat
HumboldtBlue
@frosty:
Hell yeah.
What band turns down a slide guitar?
JWR
@frosty:
Sure! Do you really play slide? (And just to note, I’ve never been any good at all on bottleneck slide. Never cared for it, either.) But my dad had a lap steel while he was in the Air Force, and I’d always wanted one, so I finally plopped down $75 for one of those Rogue lap steels. The scale length is way to short, (extendable via an inexpensive after-market kit), but the sound! OMG! It reminds me of the sound of one of those old Silvertone rubber-neck solid bodies, (with an amp built into the case!) But the Danelectro cheese grater pickup sounded incredibly full and bright across the entire spectrum. Anyway, that’s what this Rogue sounds like.
/end of OT, personal interest stuff.
JWR
@Chetan Murthy:
Speaking of Biden’s “botched”, “chaotic”, “catastrophic!” withdrawal from Afghanistan, one of yesterday’s Sunday shows, I think it was ABC, relived those bygone glory days of journamalism by focusing on what the generals said, then on what Biden said, then back and forth, all to point out how he, Biden, plays “fast and loose with the facts, (or the truth.) I guess that’s just the price one pays to play the game these days.
~Sigh~. And it was all so easy while TFG was in the house.
prostratedragon
@opiejeanne: I hadn’t noticed that, but given the monstrous insensitivity of the whole statement, you’re guess could well be right. “Graveyard of empires” association and all that.
different-church-lady
It is impossible to feed enough stupid into the Twitter maw. The Twitter maw must eat constantly. It’s like having a pet shark.
Soprano2
I’m late to this thread, but as a person who now has to visit the cemetery to “see” my mother, my father, my sister, and most of my mother’s side of the family, that Linskey tweet is grotesque, and she deserves all the dragging and grief she got for it. It shows what kind of manners she learned that instead of a simple “I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have said what I did” she gave the weaselly “I’m sorry if you were offended”, which isn’t an apology at all and indicates that she thinks what she tweeted was perfectly OK. It’s so ironic to me that they see the person who goes to church every Sunday as a terrible person they can take cheap shots at, while they were all-in on the person who never went to church and instead spent his weekends on the golf course and Tweeting. They miss TFG so much! I think the person who said they’re just mad they have to go to Wilmington and Biden stopped their war photo-ops is pretty on the nose.
Villago Delenda Est
@Chetan Murthy: Motherfucker defied a direct order. In one of the Hornblower novels, a musician was sentenced to death for changing a note.