Twitter has given reporters a new outlet for expressing their biases, often with disastrous results.
In 2010, then-CNN editor Octavia Nasr was fired for her tweeted admiration of Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, a deceased Lebanese cleric known for inspiring the Hezbollah movement.
More recently CNN’s Roland Martin faced a suspension back in February for a tweet interpreted to be anti-gay. And Politico reporter Joe Williams’ career remains in limbo partially due to his indiscretions on the social media outlet.
That’s a lesson that has apparently been lost on AdWeek’s Anthony Crupi. Earlier this week, the AdWeek writer took a shot at Fox News Channel host Neil Cavuto on Twitter. According to Crupi’s tweet, Cavuto was deriving some sort of pleasure from the nation’s bad economic data:
You can literally hear Neil Cavuto’s weird, dwarfish Irish-Italian dick fill with blood every time he reports negative economic data
Crupi’s attacks haven’t been relegated to Cavuto alone. He has also mocked screenwriter and producer Aaron Sorkin’s sex life.
I bet when Aaron Sorkin rubs one out, he thinks of a woman looking at him helplessly and saying, “Please…I don’t know how to do things.”
At issue is whether or not Crupi’s emboldened rhetoric on Twitter interferes with his reporter duties, having written about the cable news network as recently as January. But according to AdWeek editor Jim Cooper, there is no conflict of interest.
“Just as a point of clarification, Anthony Crupi does not cover the cable business, so he doesn’t technically cover Fox News,” Cooper said to The Daily Caller. “We do have a reporter that covers cable and Fox as a beat, and that’s not Anthony, so he’s not necessarily covering Fox.”
As for what is appropriate decorum for AdWeek reporters on Twitter, Cooper said the outlet encourages discretion and denies any degree of partisanship within the magazine and its website.
“We don’t have a formal Twitter policy in place for our reporters,” he said. “But when a tweet goes beyond the inappropriate, we do ask our writers to tone it down. You know, we do try to cover the news networks as neutrally as possible.”
Cooper said that Crupi’s tweet did go over the line and that they had discussed it, but said he had no power over his employees in this regard.
“I think it did go over the line and we talked about it,” he said. “But it is his Twitter feed, so it’s not — I don’t own that Twitter feed. I can’t control, I can’t force him to completely censor himself, but ask him just to be cognizant of his position with us.”