Berniewood Hogan
IT'S BERNIE SANDERS WITH A STEEL CHAIR!
all that bullshyt nap posted about bernie's campaign guy was false 
2020 Democratic Primary Thread: Focus on House & Senate races
- Thread starter mc_brew
- Start date
JoogJoint
In my own league.
I really wish these Democrats who have no shot in winning anything just stay in their states and turn most of the Senate seats Blue where they are needed more.
John Reena
Superstar
Obama and Michelle campaigning for Biden/Abrams not even fair
He’s putting on a master classOG Biden still on top of the latest CNN poll
when Stacey signs that deal and then he interviews with Oprah, it’s a got damn wrap Heard someone say it would give opponents two targets and the possibility of a less cohesive campaign
Secure Da Bag
Veteran
Well if Biden is going to have the audacity to have Abrams on the ticket to shore up the AA base, then she better have him support H.R. 40. Also she better make him have a strong, very strong criminal justice and prison reform bill. Something that goes beyond the bill that was passed and Obama's bill. There's a reason Biden is choosing her to be on the ticket. She'd do well to know her true worth and leverage the hell out of it.
I hope she understands her true worth because at the end of the day he needs her more than she needs him. She's still in her 40's and has opportunities to join other campaigns or run for senate. Honestly, I don't see what's in it for her to save Biden right now when Beto & Bernie will probably have her as a top VP candidate as well. Biden could also hurt Abrams rep if she's forced to defend his suspect record.
Facts. You can't just be a loser aiming to gamble again.
And yes, i understand voters can get shyt wrong, but not even being in office hurts you a lot.
all that bullshyt nap posted about bernie's campaign guy was false
no its not:
Plus, check David Simon's twitter. He's pissed off at Sirota because he blatantly lied. You need to stop looking for voices not even holding Sirota accountable for the fraudulent shyt he did. It violates all journalistic ethics. I mean seriously, you have Greenwald coming to Sirota's defense and toxic idiots like Walker Bragman. Just stop it. Those cult members are disgusting liars. Even Taibbi said he was coming to Sirota's defense as a friend. They're all cliqued up and coming to his defense.
Outline - Read & annotate without distractions
A journalist (and Bernie Sanders supporter) had a relationship he kept from his readers
March 20, 2019
Journalist David Sirota has spent the past few months trashing Democratic candidates not named Bernie Sanders, as well as those who support anyone other than Sanders. “Positively unhinged,” he tweeted in response to those who disagreed with one of his takes. His critics, he said at another point, are “mentally incapacitated.”
Among other targets, Sirota has gone after Sens. Kamala D. Harris (Calif.) and Cory Booker (N.J.), former vice president Joe Biden and former congressman Beto O’Rourke (Tex.), all of whom are expected to contend for the Democratic presidential nomination against Sanders (I-Vt.).
But what Sirota, who wrote for a variety of publications, didn’t reveal was where he was coming from: essentially, from inside Sanders’s campaign.
Unmentioned to his 125,000 Twitter followers and readers of his articles, Sirota has been advising Sanders while publicly attacking the candidate’s critics and rivals. On Tuesday, the relationship became official — Sirota was hired as a speechwriter and senior adviser to Sanders — just as the Atlantic magazine called out what could be the journalist’s conflict of interest.
A reporter’s undisclosed connection to a political candidate would constitute a breach of journalistic ethics. The basic rule is that journalists are supposed to be free of any personal or financial relationship with those they cover or comment on, even an “informal” relationship. Alternatively, reporters are obligated to at least disclose such relationships so that readers or viewers can evaluate the integrity of the reporting for themselves.
Sirota, 43, not only didn’t mention his relationship with Sanders’s campaign but apparently sought to erase his long history of attacks against Sanders’s opponents, according to the Atlantic. Just hours before his hiring by Sanders was announced, Sirota deleted about 20,000 or so of his tweets. He suggested that the timing of the mass deletion was coincidental, telling the Atlantic that his account was scrubbed by an “autodeleter” that periodically and automatically removes his posts.
It remains unclear how long Sirota advised the Sanders camp before his hiring. Neither Sirota nor Sanders’s representatives responded to multiple requests for comment on Wednesday.
Sirota’s vitriolic tweets and blog posts also appear to be at odds with the ethos of the Sanders’s campaign, which has stressed that it will “respectfully engage” other Democratic candidates. His hiring as a speechwriter also appears to be an acknowledgment that Sanders, whose extemporaneous public remarks have been a sign of his authenticity, will at times be scripted like other politicians.
Sirota has never hidden his political leanings; he has described himself as an “advocacy” journalist who reports and opines from a liberal perspective. He served as Sanders’s press secretary 20 years ago, although he has maintained that their association did not color his subsequent work as a journalist.
Sirota has written for news outlets including the International Business Times, Pando Daily and the Guardian.
Before officially joining the Sanders campaign, he regularly wrote for Capital & Main, a nonprofit news site that covers income inequality, climate change, race and criminal justice, among other topics.
His discussions with Sanders weren’t disclosed in his recent work for the site, which included a favorable stories about the Democratic-backed New Green Deal, and interviews with Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democratic presidential candidate; New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio (D) and filmmaker Adam McKay about his film, “Vice,” a scathing drama about former vice president Richard B. Cheney (R).
In a statement on Wednesday, the site’s publisher, Danny Feingold, said, “Without commenting on the accuracy of [the Atlantic’s] report, Capital & Main wishes to be clear that we didn’t know that Mr. Sirota was engaged in any activity that aided Mr. Sanders. When we became aware of Mr. Sirota’s interest in working for Mr. Sanders, he wrote no further stories for us.”
Feingold said Sirota told him during the second week of February that he was interested in working for the Sanders campaign. He said he didn’t have “enough facts” to conclude that Sirota was simultaneously advising Sanders while working for Capital & Main but that the site would notify readers if it determined that was the case. He added, “If we determine that Mr. Sirota was advising the Sanders campaign while working for Capital & Main, we would be very unlikely to publish his work in the future.”
Among his many critiques, Sirota went after Ashley Pratte, the author of an NBCNews.com op-ed that called Biden “the Democrats’ best chance to beat Trump.” Sirota noted that Pratte had been a spokeswoman for the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council and said Biden had just been endorsed by a former representative of “the group that pushes right-wing legislation in state capitals across the country,” according to a tweet reviewed by the Atlantic.
He also attacked presidential candidate Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) by tweeting “Welcome to the oligarchy” in response to a CNBC article in February about Gillibrand’s outreach to big-money donors. And, according to the Atlantic, he criticized her for working for a law firm that represented tobacco company Philip Morris.
At one point, the magazine said, Sirota also tweeted that he was not engaged in “some sort of secretive political conspiracy for a particular candidate.”
March 20, 2019
Journalist David Sirota has spent the past few months trashing Democratic candidates not named Bernie Sanders, as well as those who support anyone other than Sanders. “Positively unhinged,” he tweeted in response to those who disagreed with one of his takes. His critics, he said at another point, are “mentally incapacitated.”
Among other targets, Sirota has gone after Sens. Kamala D. Harris (Calif.) and Cory Booker (N.J.), former vice president Joe Biden and former congressman Beto O’Rourke (Tex.), all of whom are expected to contend for the Democratic presidential nomination against Sanders (I-Vt.).
But what Sirota, who wrote for a variety of publications, didn’t reveal was where he was coming from: essentially, from inside Sanders’s campaign.
Unmentioned to his 125,000 Twitter followers and readers of his articles, Sirota has been advising Sanders while publicly attacking the candidate’s critics and rivals. On Tuesday, the relationship became official — Sirota was hired as a speechwriter and senior adviser to Sanders — just as the Atlantic magazine called out what could be the journalist’s conflict of interest.
A reporter’s undisclosed connection to a political candidate would constitute a breach of journalistic ethics. The basic rule is that journalists are supposed to be free of any personal or financial relationship with those they cover or comment on, even an “informal” relationship. Alternatively, reporters are obligated to at least disclose such relationships so that readers or viewers can evaluate the integrity of the reporting for themselves.
Sirota, 43, not only didn’t mention his relationship with Sanders’s campaign but apparently sought to erase his long history of attacks against Sanders’s opponents, according to the Atlantic. Just hours before his hiring by Sanders was announced, Sirota deleted about 20,000 or so of his tweets. He suggested that the timing of the mass deletion was coincidental, telling the Atlantic that his account was scrubbed by an “autodeleter” that periodically and automatically removes his posts.
It remains unclear how long Sirota advised the Sanders camp before his hiring. Neither Sirota nor Sanders’s representatives responded to multiple requests for comment on Wednesday.
Sirota’s vitriolic tweets and blog posts also appear to be at odds with the ethos of the Sanders’s campaign, which has stressed that it will “respectfully engage” other Democratic candidates. His hiring as a speechwriter also appears to be an acknowledgment that Sanders, whose extemporaneous public remarks have been a sign of his authenticity, will at times be scripted like other politicians.
Sirota has never hidden his political leanings; he has described himself as an “advocacy” journalist who reports and opines from a liberal perspective. He served as Sanders’s press secretary 20 years ago, although he has maintained that their association did not color his subsequent work as a journalist.
Sirota has written for news outlets including the International Business Times, Pando Daily and the Guardian.
Before officially joining the Sanders campaign, he regularly wrote for Capital & Main, a nonprofit news site that covers income inequality, climate change, race and criminal justice, among other topics.
His discussions with Sanders weren’t disclosed in his recent work for the site, which included a favorable stories about the Democratic-backed New Green Deal, and interviews with Washington Gov. Jay Inslee, a Democratic presidential candidate; New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio (D) and filmmaker Adam McKay about his film, “Vice,” a scathing drama about former vice president Richard B. Cheney (R).
In a statement on Wednesday, the site’s publisher, Danny Feingold, said, “Without commenting on the accuracy of [the Atlantic’s] report, Capital & Main wishes to be clear that we didn’t know that Mr. Sirota was engaged in any activity that aided Mr. Sanders. When we became aware of Mr. Sirota’s interest in working for Mr. Sanders, he wrote no further stories for us.”
Feingold said Sirota told him during the second week of February that he was interested in working for the Sanders campaign. He said he didn’t have “enough facts” to conclude that Sirota was simultaneously advising Sanders while working for Capital & Main but that the site would notify readers if it determined that was the case. He added, “If we determine that Mr. Sirota was advising the Sanders campaign while working for Capital & Main, we would be very unlikely to publish his work in the future.”
Among his many critiques, Sirota went after Ashley Pratte, the author of an NBCNews.com op-ed that called Biden “the Democrats’ best chance to beat Trump.” Sirota noted that Pratte had been a spokeswoman for the conservative American Legislative Exchange Council and said Biden had just been endorsed by a former representative of “the group that pushes right-wing legislation in state capitals across the country,” according to a tweet reviewed by the Atlantic.
He also attacked presidential candidate Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) by tweeting “Welcome to the oligarchy” in response to a CNBC article in February about Gillibrand’s outreach to big-money donors. And, according to the Atlantic, he criticized her for working for a law firm that represented tobacco company Philip Morris.
At one point, the magazine said, Sirota also tweeted that he was not engaged in “some sort of secretive political conspiracy for a particular candidate.”
@88m3 @dtownreppin214 the depths these guys go through to defend flat out fraud is disgusting but not surprising
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Berniewood Hogan
IT'S BERNIE SANDERS WITH A STEEL CHAIR!
Shut up, idiot.
Bernie Sanders will be the next President of the United States
Bernie Sanders will be the next President of the United States
Bruh, legitimate journalists are NOT happy with what Sirota did.Shut up, idiot.
Bernie Sanders will be the next President of the United States
For fukks sake...he was pushing the Uranium One story!
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opin...entator-campaign-aide/?utm_term=.2a0b9119f139
washingtonpost.com
Opinion | A Bernie Sanders devotee makes a bumpy transition from commentator to campaign aide
By Erik Wemple
10-13 minutes
Erik Wemple
Media critic with a focus on the ups and downs and downs of the cable-news industry.
Like many in today’s media-politics universe, David Sirota has an email list to which he blasts his latest accomplishments. Sometimes he signs off with a little flourish: “Rock the boat, David.”
Way to heed your own advice, Mr. Sirota. This week, he announced to his email friends that he had accepted a job as senior adviser and speechwriter for the presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). But that’s not all Sirota did. He also erased an extensive Twitter archive in which he has done short-form combat with all kinds of folks who differed from his specific view of American politics: A far-left one, that is. “When Bernie asked me to join his campaign, I felt I could not turn that request down, because I genuinely believe that the future of our country, our planet and our children are at stake in this election,” wrote Sirota, who also noted that the “new job was not something I expected or planned for — but it is something I am excited to do.”
Not expected? asked Edward-Isaac Dovere of the Atlantic. On the contrary, wrote Dovere, Sirota for some time had been ramping up to his role with the Sanders campaign. From his story under the headline, “Bernie Sanders Just Hired His Twitter Attack Dog”:
Since December, David Sirota has, on Twitter, on his own website, and in columns in The Guardian, been trashing most of Sanders’s Democratic opponents — all without disclosing his work with Sanders — and has been pushing back on critics by saying that he was criticizing the other Democrats as a journalist. He centered many of his attacks on Beto O’Rourke, but he also bashed Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Joe Biden, Kirsten Gillibrand, Michael Bennet, John Hickenlooper, Mike Bloomberg, and even Andrew Cuomo.
Some background here: Sirota worked two decades ago for Sanders when the Vermont independent was serving in the House of Representatives — a “formative experience,” Sirota said in a recent email blast. Other political gigs — campaign aide to former Montana governor Brian Schweitzer (D),and a stint at the Center for American Progress, for instance — filled the years before he became a full-time journalist in 2006. As the bio page on his website explains, he has been a television commentator, an “award-winning radio host," a “bestselling author” and a reporter with bylines in the New York Times Magazine, Politico Magazine, Harper’s, Wired, Vice, the Nation and Salon.com. He has done investigative work for Newsweek/IBT and Capital & Main, and wrote a monthly column for the Guardian.
No bio of Sirota would be complete, however, without mention of his pugilistic ways on Twitter, where he has 129,000 followers. Just how he cultivated such an audience, however, is difficult to excavate at this point because Sirota deleted more than 20,000 tweets after Dovere sent a list of questions to him regarding his transition from journalism to hired political work. The move annoyed people who have had social media engagements with the Sanders devotee:
One hundred twenty five thousand followers, sorry. Anyway, good to know, chill dude, great attitude toward press, upside down smile emoji
— Sady Doyle (@sadydoyle) March 19, 2019
....of rabid Sanders supporters decrying my cruel abuse of a heroic and independent spirit of unbridled journalism. Turns out that according to today's reports, David Sirota was even then advising and in consultation with the Sanders campaign. And today, upon being named...
— David Simon (@AoDespair) March 19, 2019
Actually, it’s not too clear exactly how and when Sirota transitioned from being a journalist to a Sanders campaign aide. We requested an interview with Sirota about the timeline, though he asked that the discussion be off the record. The call ended quite promptly after the Erik Wemple Blog insisted that the whole discussion occur on the record. There is nothing so sensitive about this ruckus that cannot be discussed in the cheery light of day.
In any case, the Guardian US has asked the Atlantic to correct Dovere’s claim that Sirota’s work for the publication overlapped with his “work” for Sanders. “David Sirota’s work last appeared in Guardian US at the end of December 2018. Once David Sirota was approached by Sanders’ team, he stopped writing for Guardian US. We hope The Atlantic will correct the story,” reads a statement from a Guardian News & Media spokesperson. John Mulholland, the editor of Guardian US, told the Erik Wemple Blog that there was a strict separation between these two worlds: “David was not doing anything formally or informally for Sanders while he was writing for us,” wrote Mulholland, who also tweeted:
Re Atlantic piece about David Sirota: If @isaacdovere had contacted us before publication we could have corrected the reporting error in advance. David's last piece for us was end of December. The first contact he had from Sanders was mid January.
— john mulholland (@jnmulholland) March 19, 2019
Sirota’s contributions for the Guardian US petered out in December 2018, when he wrote a piece blasting former representative Beto O’Rourke’s voting record while in the House, saying the Texan “voted for GOP bills that his fellow Democratic lawmakers said reinforced Republicans’ anti-tax ideology, chipped away at the Affordable Care Act (ACA), weakened Wall Street regulations, boosted the fossil fuel industry and bolstered Donald Trump’s immigration policy.”
In response to the objections from the Guardian, Dovere updated his Atlantic story to add this paragraph:
There’s an important distinction at play here. Whereas, Dovere’s original reporting suggests that Sirota’s “work with Sanders” overlapped with his contributions to the Guardian, his update falls back to a less troublesome circumstance — namely, that Sirota allegedly had “conversations” with Sanders aides during this period. “Conversations” trigger a different ethical standard than does “work.”
On Thursday morning, Mulholland told the Erik Wemple Blog that he’d written to Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of the Atlantic, seeking a correction.
Capital & Main, the nonprofit, California-based news outlet that published investigative work by Sirota, tells the Erik Wemple Blog in a statement: “In a story on [the Atlantic’s website] it was reported that former Capital & Main staff writer David Sirota was advising Bernie Sanders for several months before leaving Capital & Main. Without commenting on the accuracy of that report, Capital & Main wishes to be clear that we didn’t know that Mr. Sirota was engaged in any activity that aided Mr. Sanders. When we became aware of Mr. Sirota’s interest in working for Mr. Sanders, he wrote no further stories for us.” Danny Feingold, the publisher of Capital & Main, tells us that Sirota disclosed his “interest in working for the Sanders campaign” during the second week of February. “At this point, we have no knowledge of Mr. Sirota doing work for Mr. Sanders in the months preceding February but are continuing to investigate,” notes Feingold.
The Sirota episode is something greater than just another Twitter spat. It’s a reminder of the intimacies involved in journalism. In a clean world, political journalists would remain political journalists and political aides would remain political aides. In our actual, messy world, politics and the media are like adjacent townhouses separated by quarter-inch drywall. Kick through a panel or two, and you’re on the other side. The crossover happens all the time: Sarah Isgur, Jay Carney, Linda Douglass, Tony Snow, just to name a few.
Aside from the alleged overlap, what sets Sirota apart is his bellicosity — on Twitter and elsewhere. As Dovere reported, Sirota went after not only O’Rourke but also Sens. Kamala D. Harris (Calif.), Cory Booker (N.J.), Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.) and others vying with Sanders for the Democratic presidential nomination. Dovere:
When people have questioned his tactics, Sirota has called them “mentally incapacitated.” Responding in mid-January to those who criticized him online for preemptively railing against the record of O’Rourke, who had not yet entered the race but had been a huge source of concern for Sanders allies since talk of O’Rourke’s potential presidential run picked up last year, Sirota tweeted, “The screaming temper tantrums by Democratic Party operatives whenever reporters scrutinize a lawmaker’s voting record is something to behold. These people quite literally hate democracy.”
At another point, he said his critics “are deranged and/or running a deliberate [disinformation] campaign.” “Positively unhinged,” he wrote about them a separate time.
One Twitter user wrote that Sirota “angrily smeared anyone who accused him of being in the tank for Sanders, which makes him a liar . . .”
A fuller evaluation of these various claims would be much easier if Sirota hadn’t deleted nearly his entire Twitter archive. In a response to the Atlantic, he mentioned an "autodeleter that periodically and automatically deletes tweets. I started doing this many months ago.” That move, combined with Sirota’s commitment to off-the-record discussions of his recent activities, places him on the tenebrous extreme of the transparency spectrum.
And it’s there that this story now rests. We now have a Twitter cleanser serving as a senior adviser and speechwriter for the Sanders campaign. The stage is thus set for some delicious commentary when the senator’s campaign inevitably demands accountability and transparency from some organization or other.
Attempts to secure comment from the Sanders campaign have come to naught.
Opinion | A Bernie Sanders devotee makes a bumpy transition from commentator to campaign aide
By Erik Wemple
10-13 minutes
Erik Wemple
Media critic with a focus on the ups and downs and downs of the cable-news industry.
Like many in today’s media-politics universe, David Sirota has an email list to which he blasts his latest accomplishments. Sometimes he signs off with a little flourish: “Rock the boat, David.”
Way to heed your own advice, Mr. Sirota. This week, he announced to his email friends that he had accepted a job as senior adviser and speechwriter for the presidential campaign of Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.). But that’s not all Sirota did. He also erased an extensive Twitter archive in which he has done short-form combat with all kinds of folks who differed from his specific view of American politics: A far-left one, that is. “When Bernie asked me to join his campaign, I felt I could not turn that request down, because I genuinely believe that the future of our country, our planet and our children are at stake in this election,” wrote Sirota, who also noted that the “new job was not something I expected or planned for — but it is something I am excited to do.”
Not expected? asked Edward-Isaac Dovere of the Atlantic. On the contrary, wrote Dovere, Sirota for some time had been ramping up to his role with the Sanders campaign. From his story under the headline, “Bernie Sanders Just Hired His Twitter Attack Dog”:
Since December, David Sirota has, on Twitter, on his own website, and in columns in The Guardian, been trashing most of Sanders’s Democratic opponents — all without disclosing his work with Sanders — and has been pushing back on critics by saying that he was criticizing the other Democrats as a journalist. He centered many of his attacks on Beto O’Rourke, but he also bashed Kamala Harris, Cory Booker, Joe Biden, Kirsten Gillibrand, Michael Bennet, John Hickenlooper, Mike Bloomberg, and even Andrew Cuomo.
Some background here: Sirota worked two decades ago for Sanders when the Vermont independent was serving in the House of Representatives — a “formative experience,” Sirota said in a recent email blast. Other political gigs — campaign aide to former Montana governor Brian Schweitzer (D),and a stint at the Center for American Progress, for instance — filled the years before he became a full-time journalist in 2006. As the bio page on his website explains, he has been a television commentator, an “award-winning radio host," a “bestselling author” and a reporter with bylines in the New York Times Magazine, Politico Magazine, Harper’s, Wired, Vice, the Nation and Salon.com. He has done investigative work for Newsweek/IBT and Capital & Main, and wrote a monthly column for the Guardian.
No bio of Sirota would be complete, however, without mention of his pugilistic ways on Twitter, where he has 129,000 followers. Just how he cultivated such an audience, however, is difficult to excavate at this point because Sirota deleted more than 20,000 tweets after Dovere sent a list of questions to him regarding his transition from journalism to hired political work. The move annoyed people who have had social media engagements with the Sanders devotee:
One hundred twenty five thousand followers, sorry. Anyway, good to know, chill dude, great attitude toward press, upside down smile emoji
— Sady Doyle (@sadydoyle) March 19, 2019
....of rabid Sanders supporters decrying my cruel abuse of a heroic and independent spirit of unbridled journalism. Turns out that according to today's reports, David Sirota was even then advising and in consultation with the Sanders campaign. And today, upon being named...
— David Simon (@AoDespair) March 19, 2019
Actually, it’s not too clear exactly how and when Sirota transitioned from being a journalist to a Sanders campaign aide. We requested an interview with Sirota about the timeline, though he asked that the discussion be off the record. The call ended quite promptly after the Erik Wemple Blog insisted that the whole discussion occur on the record. There is nothing so sensitive about this ruckus that cannot be discussed in the cheery light of day.
In any case, the Guardian US has asked the Atlantic to correct Dovere’s claim that Sirota’s work for the publication overlapped with his “work” for Sanders. “David Sirota’s work last appeared in Guardian US at the end of December 2018. Once David Sirota was approached by Sanders’ team, he stopped writing for Guardian US. We hope The Atlantic will correct the story,” reads a statement from a Guardian News & Media spokesperson. John Mulholland, the editor of Guardian US, told the Erik Wemple Blog that there was a strict separation between these two worlds: “David was not doing anything formally or informally for Sanders while he was writing for us,” wrote Mulholland, who also tweeted:
Re Atlantic piece about David Sirota: If @isaacdovere had contacted us before publication we could have corrected the reporting error in advance. David's last piece for us was end of December. The first contact he had from Sanders was mid January.
— john mulholland (@jnmulholland) March 19, 2019
Sirota’s contributions for the Guardian US petered out in December 2018, when he wrote a piece blasting former representative Beto O’Rourke’s voting record while in the House, saying the Texan “voted for GOP bills that his fellow Democratic lawmakers said reinforced Republicans’ anti-tax ideology, chipped away at the Affordable Care Act (ACA), weakened Wall Street regulations, boosted the fossil fuel industry and bolstered Donald Trump’s immigration policy.”
In response to the objections from the Guardian, Dovere updated his Atlantic story to add this paragraph:
There’s an important distinction at play here. Whereas, Dovere’s original reporting suggests that Sirota’s “work with Sanders” overlapped with his contributions to the Guardian, his update falls back to a less troublesome circumstance — namely, that Sirota allegedly had “conversations” with Sanders aides during this period. “Conversations” trigger a different ethical standard than does “work.”
On Thursday morning, Mulholland told the Erik Wemple Blog that he’d written to Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of the Atlantic, seeking a correction.
Capital & Main, the nonprofit, California-based news outlet that published investigative work by Sirota, tells the Erik Wemple Blog in a statement: “In a story on [the Atlantic’s website] it was reported that former Capital & Main staff writer David Sirota was advising Bernie Sanders for several months before leaving Capital & Main. Without commenting on the accuracy of that report, Capital & Main wishes to be clear that we didn’t know that Mr. Sirota was engaged in any activity that aided Mr. Sanders. When we became aware of Mr. Sirota’s interest in working for Mr. Sanders, he wrote no further stories for us.” Danny Feingold, the publisher of Capital & Main, tells us that Sirota disclosed his “interest in working for the Sanders campaign” during the second week of February. “At this point, we have no knowledge of Mr. Sirota doing work for Mr. Sanders in the months preceding February but are continuing to investigate,” notes Feingold.
The Sirota episode is something greater than just another Twitter spat. It’s a reminder of the intimacies involved in journalism. In a clean world, political journalists would remain political journalists and political aides would remain political aides. In our actual, messy world, politics and the media are like adjacent townhouses separated by quarter-inch drywall. Kick through a panel or two, and you’re on the other side. The crossover happens all the time: Sarah Isgur, Jay Carney, Linda Douglass, Tony Snow, just to name a few.
Aside from the alleged overlap, what sets Sirota apart is his bellicosity — on Twitter and elsewhere. As Dovere reported, Sirota went after not only O’Rourke but also Sens. Kamala D. Harris (Calif.), Cory Booker (N.J.), Kirsten Gillibrand (N.Y.) and others vying with Sanders for the Democratic presidential nomination. Dovere:
When people have questioned his tactics, Sirota has called them “mentally incapacitated.” Responding in mid-January to those who criticized him online for preemptively railing against the record of O’Rourke, who had not yet entered the race but had been a huge source of concern for Sanders allies since talk of O’Rourke’s potential presidential run picked up last year, Sirota tweeted, “The screaming temper tantrums by Democratic Party operatives whenever reporters scrutinize a lawmaker’s voting record is something to behold. These people quite literally hate democracy.”
At another point, he said his critics “are deranged and/or running a deliberate [disinformation] campaign.” “Positively unhinged,” he wrote about them a separate time.
One Twitter user wrote that Sirota “angrily smeared anyone who accused him of being in the tank for Sanders, which makes him a liar . . .”
A fuller evaluation of these various claims would be much easier if Sirota hadn’t deleted nearly his entire Twitter archive. In a response to the Atlantic, he mentioned an "autodeleter that periodically and automatically deletes tweets. I started doing this many months ago.” That move, combined with Sirota’s commitment to off-the-record discussions of his recent activities, places him on the tenebrous extreme of the transparency spectrum.
And it’s there that this story now rests. We now have a Twitter cleanser serving as a senior adviser and speechwriter for the Sanders campaign. The stage is thus set for some delicious commentary when the senator’s campaign inevitably demands accountability and transparency from some organization or other.
Attempts to secure comment from the Sanders campaign have come to naught.
@88m3 @dtownreppin214 @Atlrocafella @panopticon @johnedwarduado
intra vires
Glory to Michigan
Meh it's all about optics which makes Booker and Gillibrand look silly although there's still time.
We know where Harris stands, skipping it this time after her speech in 2017 and her general posture is irrelevant. We know O'Rourke stands, that Intercept piece I linked to in his 2020 thread shows he's better on Israel than most of his peers even if it isn't quite what most would like it to be.
intra vires
Glory to Michigan
Give this man a cabinet position.
If he's Secretary of State i'll be happy.
