"Up Yours, Jew Boy" Scandal

Mark Noonan

Over at Big Government:

Apparently NBC “Dateline” producer Jane Stone or someone else who has access to her Blackberry has a problem with groups that oppose ACORN and with an ethnocultural minority.

When Stone received an email urging Congress to defund ACORN from Alex Rosenwald, director of media outreach for Americans for Limited Government, the following sentence came back to Rosenwald from Stone’s account: “Bite me, Jew Boy!”

NBC denies emphatically:

Americans for Limited Government has chosen to launch an outrageous, reckless attack and smear campaign against an NBC News employee. Faced with irrefutable evidence that our employee did nothing more than ask to be removed from an email mailing list, the organization has maliciously published a fabricated email.

Our employee never sent any such email.. She is completely innocent of the outrageous charges and is being used by an organization to make a self-serving point. This is a shameless, hateful and defaming act which should be roundly denounced.

Someone is lying – either Americans for Limited Government, or NBC. It’ll be very interesting to see how this turns out.

All sides appear to agree that Ms. Stone did receive an e mail from ALG and that she did respond to it. No big deal – I think all of us who are politically connected in any way get a score or more such e mails per day, from friends and opponents. I, myself, have never asked to be taken off a list – opponents sending me e mails can be illuminating about what they are up to. I can imagine that someone would want to be taken off – but why would a news person want to be disconnected from an easy source for what is going on?

ALG appears to be a respectable libertarian/conservative organization dedicated to speaking truth to power – why phony up an anti-Semitic e mail from an MSMer? It is possible someone at ALG did it, but it doesn’t seem too likely. Given the rapidly rising anti-Semitism on the left, I think the ball is in NBC’s court to demonstrate to us that the e mail did not go out with that message.