Taylor Lorenz Is a Crybully
31st August 2022
The Washington Post is one of America’s most revered news organizations. Once led by Katharine Graham, an era-defining media CEO, and edited by news legend Ben Bradlee, the Post is famous for the Watergate-era journalism of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, which made it the nation’s political paper of record.
Today, one of the Post’s most high-profile employees is an internet-culture reporter named Taylor Lorenz. Her involvement in numerous scandals involving reporting errors, frequent falsehoods, violations of journalistic norms and troubling online interactions call into question whether outlets like the Post can continue to function effectively as the Fourth Estate in the age of online clout-chasing and click-based news.
A former social-media manager and marketer, Lorenz is credited with carving out a new kind of internet-focused journalism that made social media culture a topic for serious coverage. Upon hiring her earlier this year, the Post called Lorenz the “country’s premier chronicler of internet culture.” But Lorenz, who declined to be interviewed for this article, has also become a lightning rod whose Wikipedia “controversies” section is as long as the rest of the entry.