Thread by @thomasafine

The hit piece against @SethAbramson has really gotten under my skin. And it's not because I worship the ground he walks on. I've been critical of him many times in the past and I'm sure I will be in the future.

I might even agree with some elements in the story. There's probably a very good piece to write about the relative merits and problems with Seth's approach to journalism does, but this piece isn't it.

The real problem is the highlighted section of this early paragraph in the story.

It's a critical piece to the story because with it, the entire rest of the story is framed with the implication: "Seth is a delusional habitual liar". Take away that sentence and the story has no meat.

It's factually true (I assume) that the reporter got these responses. And I'm not even claiming they were lies. It's entirely possible that one contact at CNN didn't remember or even know Seth had advised them.

And for Politico, the reporter has pulled a bait and switch, having turned Seth's claim that he did work for Politico into a question to Politico about whether they'd offered him a job. Of course Politico would say they hadn't, because Seth never made that claim.

So at this point only the reporter, @lyzl working for @CJR is making this claim.

The impression that this faulty claim together with these denials leaves with the reader is that Seth made up both relationships out of whole cloth.

It's central to all that follows.

This is the critical error made by @lyzl and the editors at @CJR. They should have gone back to Seth with these refutations and Seth could have cleared their misinterpretation (we hope it was that) that he was offered a job, and provided evidence of these relationships.

But they didn't. They just published what looks to me like libel.

To refute this, Seth underscores publicly that he never claimed he was offered a job, but offers evidence of his relationship with Politico to demonstrate that he's not some delusional compulsive liar.

And Seth then offered evidence to support that he did in fact work with people at Politico, and in particular with @JoshMeyerDC. He showed emails to underscore that there was a real relationship and he was not delusional.

At this point @JoshMeyerDC jumped into the fray in kind of an absurd way. Don't ask me why he didn't just keep his mouth shut. Seth's theory that Josh was embarrassed of the association and tried to make it go away (by waving his arms wildly?) seems to make some sense.

Josh claimed that the article had nothing to do with him or Politico. That's absolutely bonkers to say that something Seth told @lyzl was then twisted into libel about him had nothing to do with them.

"They libelled me about X, and here is the evidence about X."

"X: but this has nothing to do with us."

I don't know what kind of disingenuous planet you have to live on to claim that addressing a piece of libel about you with evidence is somehow improper and "bizarre". But that's what Josh did.

What it feels like is more piling on by the mainstream on someone without the MSM power to fight back. That's probably why I'm feeling peeved about all of this

The ensuing dueling receipts about the finer details of a conversation that happened more than three years ago is basically pointless to the central issue that @lyzl and @CJR apparently libelled Seth without fact checking.

And I'll note that I tend to believe that on the whole, what Seth is saying is true, because I'm pretty sure he tweeted about it obliquely back in 2018:

https://twitter.com/SethAbramson/status/954768059230769152

Josh is probably scoring some finer factual points on small details about who said what to whom first, but this is where he should have kept his mouth shut, because he's in the weeds relative to the original libel issue.

I'm probably also triggered because I truly believe that we need the kind of curatorial journalism that Seth goes on about. If Seth turns out to not be the best ambassador for that, it's unfortunate. But his imperfection doesn't justify a libelous hit piece.

Mainstream media has consistently failed to see big pictures and they need to do that. If you don't agree with all of Seth's conclusions, that's not a sign that curatorial journalism doesn't work. It just means the market is open for someone to come along and do it better.

And honestly I really hope @SethAbramson sues. Seth mentioned a couple of things that seem to establish malice.

There may have been more evidence of malice on Twitter, but @lyzl has apparently deleted every single conversation in the past in which she mentioned Seth.

There's definite signs from context that there was some malice happening:

In April of 2019 she retweeted this:

That was from archive dot org here:
web.archive.org/web/2019041917…

OK, the three deleted tweets above where someone says they love seth but this is funny, were this conversation tweeted around the same time.

Here's the link for that one:

https://web.archive.org/web/20190419115611if_/https://twitter.com/lyzl/status/1119208042711736320

(For some reason when I navigate manually through archive dot org to the above tweet, it let me scroll up and see the earlier third tweet, but when I link to it directly it does not.)

@SethAbramson I hope you see this thread as these old deleted tweets might be useful if you choose to sue.