Conservative Group Claims NBC Producer Sent “Bite Me Jew Boy” Email To Blogger
The folks at Americans for Limited Government are claiming that NBC Dateline producer and NYU professor Jane Stone sent the following email to one of their bloggers:
Bite me Jew boy! –
“Bite me Jew boy” is obviously a pretty offensive thing to say, not to mention totally inappropriate. Stone is a 15 year employee of NBC and teaches journalistic ethics at NYU.
NBC is vehemently denying the charge from ALG:
NBC News president Steve Capus fired back at Americans for Limited Government Friday, after the conservative group published an email allegedly from NBC producer Jane Stone to its director of media outreach Alex Rosenwald, with one line: “Bite me Jew Boy.”
“I’m still in shock, and outraged that this reckless organization would go out with such a defamatory, irresponsible statement,” Capus told POLITICO. “We have done a complete email analysis, all of our IT, all of our records.”
Here’s what both sides agree on: Stone responded Thursday to a mass email from ALG.
But Stone’s response email—provided to POLITICO—did not have any anti-Semitic comment. In fact, it had just one line: “Take me off this list!”
Who to believe here? I’m not sure. Both ALG and NBC are standing their ground on their respective stories, and nothing short of a court subpoena would get NBC to crack open its email servers for an independent analysis and that’s not likely to happen.
Obviously NBC’s pronounced shift to the far left in recent years (see: MSNBC, not to mention parent company GE’s hop into bed with Obama on cap and trade) has made the media conglomerate something of a piñata for the right, and a group like ALG has a lot to gain in stature from a controversy like this.
That being said, given how routine hostility and nastiness is between mainstream media types and bloggers this isn’t an unbelievable story.
At this point I don’t see any really compelling evidence to come down on one side or another. I do know this, though: If anyone at ALG is guilty of making this up the mainstream media is going to use it as a talking point about untrustworthy bloggers for years to come. Meaning that if ALG is wrong about this, they and their “NetRight Nation” should be drummed out of the limited government movement.
