This month, Politico hired Mike Elk, the sharp-tongued labor reporter who has become as infamous for bizarre feuds with fellow scribes and for his wet-kiss pieces on Big Labor for the progressive In These Times magazine.
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This will surely work out better for Elk than it will for Politico, which has a blue chip media brand to protect.
Elk gained some notoriety last year when he engaged in a feud with Eli Lake of the Daily Beast. A Twitter spat sparked by Elk’s defense of his ex-girlfriend turned into a stream of e-mails in which Elk threatened to get Lake fired from his gig.
Elk asked the writer’s boss at Daily Beast to terminate him and claimed that he would stop Lake from ever making appearances on MSNBC again. Tired of Elk’s harassment, Lake finally went public in December with all the petty details.
One would think the embarrassment of those revelations would stop Elk. Not a chance. Instead, he went on to accuse Lake of cyber-bullying, earning himself even more derision.
Wall Street Journal editorial writer Sohrab Ahmari tweeted that Elk seemed to be having a “real-time mental breakdown” (retweeted by Lake and others). Elk wrote a letter to the newspaper’s ethics editor accusing Ahmari of belittling the mentally ill.
Elk took aim at Daily Caller’s Betsy Rothstein for her write-up about his spats with Lake and Ahmari. In a series of typo-ridden e-mails, Elk accused Rothstein of being a “racist.”
Unlike Lake and Ahmari, Rothstein didn’t suffer Elk gladly. Wrote Rothstein: “Your thinking is very twisted and weird and I’ll have no part of it.”
Elk’s embarrassing tirades against Lake, Ahmari, and Rothstein are just the most-public example of his penchant for petty sparring matches unbefitting any adult.
Around the same time, Elk accused Buzzfeed’s Rosie Gray of writing a “gossipy hit piece” after reporting on how Clinton acolyte Sidney Blumenthal engaged in a whisper campaign against The Nation’s Eric Alterman and others for negative reviews of a book on Israel written by Blumenthal’s son Max. Elk would then verge into the bizarre, claiming that Gray would go after his parents to “suppress dissent”.
In case you were wondering, no, Elk’s new employer wasn’t spared from his ranting.
Over the years, he has taken to Twitter accusing the outlet of basing its operations in Arlington, Va., instead of inside the Beltway in order to avail itself of the Old Dominion’s right-to-work laws, as well as for running too many stories that are critical of labor.
Fat chance of that happening on his watch.
Elk claims that any criticism is somehow a personal attack against him for being afflicted with Asperger’s disorder, a form of autism characterized by malapropisms and other language difficulties. But suffering from Asperger’s doesn’t exclude anyone, including Elk, from being called on the carpet for bad behavior.
Even in journalism and media, in which sane and well-behaved people are few and far between, Elk’s unprofessionalism should make him persona non grata. But again, this is the media business.
The bigger problem with Elk – along with the hire of former Slate writer Timothy Noah as his boss on the labor beat – is that he can hardly be counted on to provide Politico or its readers with objective reporting.
Big Labor pumps through the Bucknell University grad’s veins. It has proven to be beneficial financially to him and his father, Gene, who works for the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America as a well-paid union rep.
Early on his journalism career, Elk made clear that he would be a committed and rarely skeptical defender of unions. He once went so far as to lend his press credentials for a mortgage banking conference to a construction union leader, a move that cost him a job with the Huffington Post.
Elk has since apologized for that decision. But even now, he gives little consideration to the possibility that unions, especially those in the public sector, are hardly champions of progressivism.
A report he co-wrote three years ago in The Nation with Bob Sloan on the role the American Legislative Exchange Council in growing the nation’s prison industrial complex, for example, failed to consider the part played by public-sector unions such as the California Correctional Peace Officers Association. The union also plays a part and benefits greatly from more Americans being locked behind bars for nonviolent offenses.
There is occasional merit to Elk’s work, when he plays the role of left-wing muckraker. Two years ago, for example, he detailed how Georgia Pacific attempted to trample the civil liberties of its workers by threatening to fire them if they didn’t vote for Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney.
But Elk’s lack of perspective on labor makes his writing more commentary than straight reporting. This is fine for In These Times, The Nation, and even Atlantic Monthly, none of which make any pretense about being objective.
But for a traditional news outlet such as Politico, which does consider itself in the vanguard of straight news on politics, it’s a problem.
Politico’s writers have lately been criticized by journalists such as Alexander Russo of This Week in Education for slipshod reporting on education and other issues. Adding an ideologue-in-reporter’s-clothing will hardly help matters.
Elk must hope that joining Politico will whitewash some of his bizarre past behavior. Maybe that will work, maybe not.
But for his new employer, there’s plenty of downside and very little up to explain why they made such a boneheaded hire.