Amid tight Senate race, Reuters reporter sat on Beto hacking story – Washington Examiner

It’d be great if reporters stopped handing President Trump ammunition for his attacks on the press.

Reuters’ Joseph Menn, for example, discovered prior to the 2018 midterm races that former Rep. Beto O’Rourke, D-Texas, was a member of the infamous Cult of the Dead Cow hacking group in the 1980s. As a contributor to the group, the former congressman penned a whole lot of deeply weird and poorly aged fiction and poetry.

Yes, he wrote violent and deeply perverted things. Still, teenagers do and say many, many, many regrettable things. The real issue here is that the Reuters journalist offered to sit on the story until after the midterm Senate races had ended, even after O’Rourke had already confirmed in 2017 that he was a member of the group. That is really bad.

Details of O’Rourke’s membership in the Cult of the Dead Cow were revealed for the first time last week in a Reuters exclusive titled, “Beto O’Rourke’s secret membership in America’s oldest hacking group.” The story revealed much of the former congressman’s teenage writings, including one bit of fiction, titled “Visions From The Last Crusade,” wherein the author fantasized about murdering children with a car. One passage reads:

That’s certainly different. The Reuters report also uncovered some of O’Rourke’s adolescent poetry, including a poem titled “The Song of the Cow,” which includes the following stanzas:

I don’t even know how to respond to that.

As interesting as all of this was last week, there was one inescapable question that many readers asked, which was: Where was all of this information during the 2018 Texas Senate race?

As it turns out, a journalist had found it. He simply didn’t tell anyone.

In a follow-up story published this weekend, Reuters reported, “After more than a year of reporting, Menn persuaded O’Rourke to talk on the record. In an interview in late 2017, O’Rourke acknowledged that he was a member of the group, on the understanding that the information would not be made public until after his Senate race against Ted Cruz in November 2018.”

The follow-up report also includes a quote from Menn wherein he revealed he was the one who made O’Rourke’s confirmation contingent on burying the story until after the 2018 midterms.

“I met Beto O’Rourke. I said ‘I’m writing a book about Cult of the Dead Cow, I think it’s really interesting. I know you were in this group. This book is going to publish after November and your Senate race is over. And he said, ‘OK,’” Menn told Reuters senior producer Jane Lee. ““And he told me about his time in the Cult of the Dead Cow.”

Naturally, his revelation he sat on the story as a favor to O’Rourke was met with harsh criticism this weekend, prompting the Reuters reporter to clarify just how his “exclusive” came to be.

“To be clear, I offered [Beto O’Rourke] an embargo because it was for a book I was on leave to write, not for my day job, and because no one else who knew would confirm the facts before the election,” Menn said this weekend on Twitter. “Not confirm what someone else said, confirm my guess. I had zero sources.”

I understand saving certain information to make his book more interesting and original, but the entire story?

“Gosh this is fun. I did not have the story before the November election because no one would talk,” Menn continued. “No one in [Cult of Dead Cow] would talk about O’Rourke until I promised not to publish before the 2018 election. That was OK: I wanted the full story for my book, which spans decades, rather than 1 scoop ahead of a state vote. I offered O’Rourke the same terms. He accepted, and we spoke.”

I don’t think this is the defense he thinks it is.

If I were Menn’s editors, I’d be having a long, rather unpleasant discussion with him right now about whether he’d like to make his side gig writing books his permanent day job.