Despite What Loesch Says, Breitbart Bloggers Revealed Identity of Woman In Weiner's Tweet

Since Anthony Weiner's press conference, Andrew Breitbart and Dana Loesch have been running around whining about how unfairly they were treated, what with people pointing out their histories of dishonesty and all. Loesch has in particular been directing her ire at Salon's Joan Walsh and hilariously demanding an apology (BTW, did Loesch ever apologize to the UMKC and UMSL professors she slandered?). Loesch is upset because Walsh tweeted that the "Breitbart empire" and other conservative blogs revealed the personal information of the woman who received the text, thus leading an army of neanderthals (my words not Walsh's) to pick through every detail of the victim's personal life. Here's what Loesch had to say about that in her self-aggrandizing pity party blog post about the topic:

She continued with her smear job by insisting that the “Breitbart empire” named the girl who received the infamous Tweet in question and “savaged” her. This is categorically false: I was the one who readied the graphic and placed the black boxes over the woman’s identity in the very first post which broke the story. The Bigs had refused to identify her.

Walsh actually later clarified her statement as follows:

One last point: Breitbots have accused me of blaming Breitbart for naming the young woman in question, based on this tweet from me Saturday night:

If the story is false, we only know about it because of the Breitbart empire and #tcot blogs, who named the girl

(You can read all my tweets on the story here.)

My point was that right-wing blogs were naming her, after Breitbart put out the story, though the original story did not. But I get the confusion: It's easy to misunderstand things on Twitter.

However, I think it's actually pretty clear that Breitbart's "empire" was primarily responsible for publicizing the identity of the woman, even though they didn't do so on Breitbart's sites. First of all, Breitbart bloggers Lee Stranahan, Patterico, Ace of Spades, and of course Jim Hoft all released the woman's name on Saturday, the day the scandal broke. In fact, Stranahan's guest post on Patterico revealing the woman's name was posted at 4:29 AM, about four hours after the story broke. So there were basically no "waking hours" whatsoever between the time the story broke and the time that Lee Stranahan, a paid employee of Breitbart, revealed the victim's name (albeit not on Breitbart's websites).

And how did the Breitbart bloggers figure out who the woman was? I have no insight into that, but I'll say that one way they could have known is by reading Dana Loesch's tweet that told them exactly how to get the name of the woman. Here is Loesch retweeting something that lead directly to the tweet that identified the woman early on Saturday:


That link led directly to the Tweet Congress page, which showed a tweet revealing the woman's identity.

So maybe you think what Loesch did was irresponsible or maybe you think it's fine, but either way, it's pretty clear that Loesch and other Breitbart bloggers did play a central role in revealing the identity of the woman the tweet was directed at. In other words, they should quit their whining.

Update: I forgot to mention the fact that a post on Breitbart's site linked to Jim Hoft's despicable blog that included the names and photos of high school girls. According the html address, the title on Hoft's original post included the phrase "young, luscious hook-ups."


So yeah, real responsible journalism there.