Ben Collins is incensed that 'country club weirdo' Jonathan Chait would suggest that he's a bit of a hack

There are relatively few people in the world of Real Journalism™ more incessantly annoying and obnoxious and insufferable than NBC News disinformation reporter Ben Collins. Just yesterday, we told you about how he claimed to fellow incessantly annoying and obnoxious and insufferable person Joy Reid that the Twitter files didn't prove censorship. Which is complete and utter BS, of course.

So during a recent rumble of sorts between Collins and Jonathan Chait, we couldn't help but root against Collins. Not because Chait isn't annoying and obnoxious and insufferable in his own way, because he most definitely is. But rather because Chait at least is not a total partisan moron. We definitely can't say that about Ben Collins.

Anyway, let's get to that rumble, shall we? It began with Chait's piece "In Defense of Independent Journalism":

The ethos of progressive opinion journalism has changed dramatically over the last two decades. On the shrinking of the "hack gap" and the ned for independent opinion journalism: https://t.co/8LHFEWpCxm
— Jonathan Chait (@jonathanchait) July 11, 2023

Collins got a special shout-out from Chait in the piece:

The same metaphor, not another inch, popped up in a memo NBC’s Ben Collins submitted to judges of the 2023 Walter Cronkite Awards for Excellence in Television Political Journalism. Collins presented the struggle for truth in martial terms. “The people putting out the truth are under siege in the information war,” he wrote. The ingredients for victory in this war, he argued, are unity and willpower:
Triumphs of the truth are not accidents. They are times the American media — including and especially those outside of the disinformation beat — did not equivocate and did not give an inch to lies and the liars who tell them … But it takes unity, and not capitulation, in these moments. There is no meeting liars halfway, because the truth then becomes one-half lie. We must simply be louder, and clearer, with the truth.
The notion that there are times when a journalist’s job is to give an inch, because the other side has a point, did not receive even a nod from Collins in his memo. (That did not seem to bother the Cronkite Awards judges, who praised Collins for his “brilliant, brave work” that was “honest and necessary.”)

Also, I stand by what I said in that speech, and your work is exactly what I'm talking about. I'm sorry for you that the winds are blowing away from arbitrary bothsidesism when two sides are asymmetrical, but thankfully it's a boon to our profession that it is.
— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) July 12, 2023

Don't come at me. https://t.co/mD3LpZ8GQv
— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) July 12, 2023

"Don't come at me." We probably weren't supposed to laugh at that, but we did. And we still are.

Reading the article and then having to go back and watch two more hours of Fox News tonight I just think of the millions of Americans who believe a QAnon propaganda film is accurate and that the 2020 election was stolen. Nice debate and all but we’ve got a serious problem.
— Decoding Fox News (@DecodingFoxNews) July 12, 2023

Guys writing columns like this are fundamentally untethered to reality. Country club weirdos who don't interact with the spaces we have to look at every day.
— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) July 12, 2023

OK, now we're laughing at Ben Collins accusing someone else of being an out-of-touch "country club weirdo." So we're laughing at two things at the same time.

I went from extremism to Fox News and honestly there isn’t that much of a difference. It’s fear, paranoia and hate mixed in with a bunch of nonsense. As someone is mixing it up at a cocktail party a bookstore is getting vandalized for holding a drag queen story hour.
— Decoding Fox News (@DecodingFoxNews) July 12, 2023

They're just not living in the world we're living in, and they're the ones who get these fancy-ass columns to shit on young reporters. It's wild.

And guess who our bosses listen to? Not the young reporters. The ones they meet at the cocktail parties.
— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) July 12, 2023

Three things now! Do we hear four? You bet we do:

I think you do great work and I appreciate all you do. Some though think you come across as partisan.
— Andrew. Founder: Pillar 🇺🇲🇬🇷 (@EmergeMarkets) July 12, 2023

That's exactly what I'm talking about. When "don't give QAnon people an inch" is a partisan statement, I am not the problem here. It's people like Chait, who refuse to look inward.
— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) July 12, 2023

As if Ben Collins is a practitioner of humble introspection. This friggin' guy. Maybe if he actually looked inward for once, he'd see what the rest of us see: that he really is just a hypocritical elitist hack. You know, what he's accusing Jonathan Chait of being.

Jon, you wrote a story about the death of journalism best practices and based it on me, and you didn't do Rule No. 1. It's pathetic.
— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) July 12, 2023

Who's pathetic, Ben?

I absolutely singled out @oneunderscore__ for criticism in this piece, and if you look at his ongoing meltdown on Twitter, it ... does not exactly refute my critique. pic.twitter.com/DQFCY7DoTc
— Jonathan Chait (@jonathanchait) July 12, 2023

Yeah, sorry. We're gonna have to agree with Chait's assessment. Ben's definitely the pathetic one in this particular scenario. As he is in so many scenarios.

Ben Collins, in my experience, hates all conservatives (he once called a 2nd-Amendment march a white nationalist rally), and believes they do not deserve freedom of speech. His brief career has been one long effort to promote censorship of anyone two steps or more to his right. https://t.co/sXrmEbUrEI
— Tim Carney (@TPCarney) July 12, 2023

He really has been the worst on this front. Others at CNN and the NYT have banged this drum, but they never seemed to have the passion or the animus that Collins does.
— Tim Carney (@TPCarney) July 12, 2023

Ben Collins is the worst on multiple fronts. The good thing about that is that we can regularly mine that for unintentional comedic gold.

These tweets are awesome. I love the idea of Collins, who curries favor with some of the most powerful liberal figures in the country by reporting on them in a very slavish manner, calling *Chait* a country-club, cocktail-party type. https://t.co/zXd7xaAEAI
— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) July 12, 2023

2/ Obviously Chait isn't a coal miner, nor would he say otherwise, but if you have close ties to like AOC and GLAAD and every other powerful liberal group, *you yourself* are very much in (the 2023 equivalent of) the country club or cocktail party!
— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) July 12, 2023

Womp-womp.

for the record, @oneunderscore__ did not reach out for comment before claiming that I belong to a country club or regularly attend cocktail parties. (Neither is true.)
— Jonathan Chait (@jonathanchait) July 12, 2023

Looks like Ben didn't do Rule No. 1. Pathetic!

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