I mean let’s do this… all the things I wanted to say when I was lied about in @BusinessInsider and what it taught me about the broader media ecosystem (on the mayors race and elsewhere)
One anonymous source was made to seem like she was 10 people (this was intentionally manipulative and undermines the credibility of anonymous sourcing in general which is actually an important tool for women especially). The same woman was behind all of the following stories:
Claims she wasn’t given keys to the office & wasn’t invited to a team basketball game because she was a woman. I, a woman, went to the bball game. SHE wasn’t invited because she was a part time volunteer who was in the office 2 days a week at best... the game was just full timers
Claims her job got taken by a man. She was a volunteer. The man was a volunteer. She wasn’t hired full time cus she was bad. He was hired full time cus he was good. I hired him. There was no sexism at play at all.
Implied a staffer raped a woman at a NYE party. They were dating. He didn't rape her. He provided the phone # of the woman to the reporter because she was happy to corroborate but the reporter never called her and ran the story anyway (it was later deleted from the article)
Said I got doxed on 4chan because of a "strategy” crafted by senior male staffers. This is insane and infantilizing. I emailed the reporter what really happed and asked her to get on the phone with me. She ignored that request.
She claimed that after I was doxed, I was sent pictures of dismembered bodies. This literally. never. happened… The reporter never corroborated it with anyone.
And ^^all that was just ONE of the sources
The only source that went on the record claimed she "only moved to Iowa for Yang's campaign. Otherwise, 'there's nothing in Iowa,' she said. 'And all of us had come from states that are like California or New York.'" Well... the month before she worked for us in Iowa...
She worked for the BERNIE campaign... IN IOWA. And she was fired after two weeks for threatening to sue their campaign for all sorts of things (like not a long enough lunch break).
That same source who was fired from the Bernie campaign claimed that she filed complaints against a male boss of hers but never sufficiently heard back from the campaign about those complaints. The article fails to mention that that male boss of hers was fired.
TWO volunteers who served as primary sources in this piece were incorrectly referred to as “former staffers” everywhere they appeared. They were both part time, volunteers. This would have been easy to fact check (campaign staff records are public) had the reporter bothered to
9 SENIOR women from the campaign reached out to the reporter in the days before she published her article asking to be interviewed for the story and to get to share their experiences. The reporter ignored them all.
In the article, the reporter linked to a list of staff members. 35 female staffers were listed. To this day, I have spoken to 28 of them who told me the reporter never tried to contact any of them for her story… about the experience of women on the Yang campaign...
One of the original sources for this story - who worked for the campaign for less than a week - accused her Black, female boss of assaulting her and called the police on her. Seven witnesses attested to the fact that the Black woman had never touched her.
Despite all ^^^this, the story was re-Tweeted by journalists at NYtimes, Politico, and others. It was even linked to BY the NYTimes. Even after the journalist who linked to the story told me that she couldn’t find much evidence for the misogyny claims.
It took full time days of work by me and other female staffers from the presidential campaign to get BI to issue a correction.
I didn’t ask for the BI story to be retracted when it first came out because “experts” told me that I wasn't even going to be able to get a correction. That this was just how things are. I was told it was normal for 1 anonymous source to be made to seem like she was 10 people
Other women and I then also had to fight to successfully STOP the story from spreading to other news outlets. We were able to successfully do this because once credible journalists looked into it, per our request, the story fell apart like a sand castle
This made me realize how easily false narratives can spread and calcify - all because of one dishonest and dishonorable journalist. It's a lot of work to prevent this from happening.
The fact that comms pros told me that this article was par for the course, was shocking to me. It suggested that our media landscape is so much more messed up than people realize and the entire industry that supports it has just been beaten into submission.
Of course Andrew lost the mayors race so it just seems like I’m bitter - I assure you that is not where this is coming from. And it's not about this one article which is clearly an egregious example.
I fought this piece so hard because it felt like it was a way to stand up for broader principals of journalism that we so desperately need and that seem to be crumbling in front of our eyes.
I’m not saying don’t trust anything ever again: that’s how we end up with QAnon. But please bring a healthy dose of skepticism to the things you read. And be independent minded.
Anyway... thanks for coming to my TedTalk. I love you #yanggang
One of my emails to a person at BI as we fought this: 
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