Ever seen a train wreck so bad you just can’t look away? That’s how I felt watching a “journalist” on the right tarnish what little of her credibility she had left.
Sarah Fields has claimed the moniker of “citizen journalist” for a couple of years now. The problem is, she doesn’t act like a journalist should in any form or fashion. She tweets out confirmation bias for those searching for it which has resulted in the doxxing of likely or totally innocent people.
Earlier this week, the story about New York State law enforcement raiding a TikTok personality’s home and confiscating his pet squirrel and raccoon broke. After the squirrel bit one of the officers during the raid, the state then euthanized both animals to test for rabies.
Somebody, but nobody knows who as they were anonymous, reported the TikToker for illegally having wild animals as pets. The squirrel, named Peanut, was rescued by the man after it fell out of its nest as an infant.
Peanut and Fred, the raccoon, had become famous on social media but some ne’er-do-well thought it necessary to stick their nose where it didn’t belong.
How freaking absurd. And how absurd for the state to waste resources carrying this out. Absurd all around.
It sparked a national outcry on Twitter and people began trying to figure out who made the reports.
Fields, who has a very large following, tweeted out, “Monica Keasler is the one who called in the complaint about Peanut. She has now deleted all of her social media. Make her famous.”
Keasler, who lives in Texas, then began getting threats. So much so that the Longview Police Department started investigating those threats.
The problem is, Fields didn’t even have a shred of evidence to prove that Keasler did this. Keasler is emphatically NOT the person who filed the complaint, a fact that Fields has now privately admitted to but has not, as of this writing, done so publicly.
She just heard it from someone who heard it from someone, and she ran with it. Does that sound like the work of an intrepid reporter to you?
Of course not. She’s an activist more obsessed with clicks and social media fame than being accurate. Fields ruined someone’s life and sicked a mob on her with nothing resembling proof of the allegation.
And this isn’t the first time she’s done this!
Two weeks ago, Fields and another similarly hackish account both named Jordan Bowen as the woman filmed screaming at a child in a stroller outside a Kamala Harris rally in Houston. It produced a predictable result of doxxing and death threats. But guess what, Bowen was not the woman in the video!
If you’re going to claim to be a journalist, maybe do your due diligence first before jumping to conclusions. What Fields did and keeps doing was lazy, pathetic, and wrong.
Having a following requires some level of responsibility. People believe things that are said, and then all too often act on it. Fields absolutely knows this and it’s no doubt why she stated in her tweet, “Make her famous.” That was a call to action by Fields and completely irresponsible and quite despicable.
Trust and reputation are hard won and easily lost. Our reporters at The Texan know this and work hard to establish that trust and reputation. And they’ve done that, because they cross their T’s and dot their I’s before running with a story.
There is a massive problem on the right with activists masquerading as journalists. I don’t think it’s the best course of action to be a partisan journalist — The Texan was founded to be the opposite of that — but there are certainly ways to do it appropriately and ways not to.
Fields has failed in every regard and she’s lost what little trust she had left. “Citizen journalists” have the same responsibility as titled journalists — get the story right before running with it, and when it’s gotten wrong, correct the record.
Just because someone has a large following doesn’t mean they have credibility. And if they operate anything like Fields, they have none whatsoever.