Business Insider’s bizarrely creepy attempt at crafting an attack piece on Palmer Report
With all that’s going on in the political world right now, you’d think a major news outlet like Business Insider would find plenty of topics to report on. Instead, it turns out Business Insider has spent the past two weeks trying to turn my life inside out so they can write an article about how awful it is that respected political figures are daring to share Palmer Report articles on Twitter.
This began when Business Insider executive editor Brett LoGiurato began attacking two respected public figures on Twitter after they had shared one of my articles. Immediately afterward, one of his reporters reached out to me in friendly fashion, trying to get me to do an interview. I replied to her and marked it “off the record” and told her I knew what she and her boss were up to, and that I was not willing to legitimize their attack piece by participating in it, and they’d be smart to just let it go. She responded by implying that she would quote my off-the-record words in her article if I refused to go on the record with her. I of course told her no. That’s when the fun started.
This Business Insider reporter, Pamela Engel, is now contacting everyone who writes for me, and everyone who has ever written an article for me – even if it was years ago – in an attempt to trick one of them into participating in her attack piece on me. I only know this because they keep warning me that she’s been doing this, as they all think she’s up to no good. I’ve learned that she’s also been contacting the public figures who have shared Palmer Report articles, to try to drag them into her hit piece.
This is not an instance of a journalist aggressively pursuing a story. This is one news outlet trying to strategically manufacture a dishonest attack piece on a smaller competing news outlet for competitive reasons, and going to stunningly creepy lengths to try to pull it off. It’s clear that Business Insider is looking to harm the reputations of the public figures who have been sharing Palmer Report articles, so they’ll be afraid to continue doing so. And all because their executive editor had a jealous meltdown on Twitter about it. Which is weird, because he’s a boss at a major news outlet and I’m nobody.
Business Insider has more than a hundred journalists on their staff. They have the resources to be doing meaningful reporting on all these important political events that are going on, and making a real difference. Instead they’re wasting their resources by creepily stalking a much smaller competitor so they can publish what I assume is going to be a work of fiction about me, just to satisfy their boss’s tantrum. And you wonder why political journalism is in the state it’s in. If the larger political news outlets were willing to do their jobs well, something like Palmer Report wouldn’t need to exist.
