Steve Cohen, a Democratic Congressman from Tennessee, says he has figured out how to game the media: just send a titillating tweet, then delete it.  Here’s the crux of the strange, meta skirmish that ensued when an eccentric congressman with a bone to pick decided to turn the tables on the prurient Beltway press.  On Tuesday night, Cohen attended a concert at the White House that showcased music from Memphis, including the stylings of ’80s rocker Cyndi Lauper. Later that night, the congressman, who represents Memphis, sent a tweet to the 59-year-old Lauper: “@cyndilauper great night,couldn’t believe how hot u were.see you again next Tuesday.try a little tenderness.” Twenty-one minutes later he deleted the note, the second of two he wrote to Lauper that evening.  The scrubbed tweet got picked up by a website called Politwoops, a Sunlight Foundation project that archives all deleted tweets by members of Congress. By Friday morning, Cohen— who also gave a tribute to Lauper on the House floor on Thursday, was catching heat in the blogosphere.  Cohen claims this is what he expected to happen. He has been in this situation before. About halfway through the State of the Union in February, Cohen tweeted a message to a pretty young blonde who told him via Twitter that she’d seen him on TV: “@victoria_brink nice to know you were watchin SOTU(state of the union).Happy Valentines beautiful girl. ilu.” Then he deleted the message. When Politwoops discovered it, the media assumed they had a sex scandal on their hands. Turns out the 24-year-old woman was Cohen’s long-lost daughter.  The lawmaker, who is a bachelor, evidently held a grudge. “Just because she’s posed in a bikini, it was assumed I’m screwing her,” Cohen told the Daily Beast Friday. “It hurt my daughter and my relationship with her.” So he crafted and deleted the tweet, he says, to get the gotcha media to rush to assumptions— and publicize his district’s musical legacy in the process. (It could also be the case that Cohen concocted the strange explanation to excuse an errant tweet to an old 80s crush; if that’s the case, the cover-up seems more trouble than the crime.)  On a slow Friday afternoon, the kerfuffle was punctuated by a surreal press conference in which Cohen explained that the rogue tweet was a publicity stunt designed to “bring attention to the need for journalistic integrity.” It got Cohen the attention he was seeking. Just not in a good way. Here’s Cohen’s full statement:  On Tuesday night, the President and Mrs. Obama, along with the Grammys and PBS, hosted a musical tribute to Memphis Soul at the White House. Wanting to promote this great program, which will air this coming Tuesday on PBS, I realized the best way to do this was to tweet and delete. I knew the Sunlight Foundation would highlight the deleted tweet as a Politwoop and knowing how some in the media report deleted Politwoops as nefarious, it occurred to me that a perfectly innocent, factually-correct tweet, once deleted, would receive great media attention. And that is exactly what happened when I tweeted:  @cyndilauper great night,couldn’t believe how hot u were.see you again next Tuesday.try a little tenderness.  The night at the White House was great, I was amazed at Cyndi Lauper’s hot performance and I look forward to seeing her performance of “Try a Little Tenderness” again when it airs next Tuesday on PBS. That’s what the tweet said but that’s not how it has been speciously interpreted in the media.  For two months, I’ve had in my mind the movie Absence of Malice, the first screenplay by Kurt Luedtke, a former reporter. The movie highlights the damage done to persons, albeit with a legal absence of malice, because of sloppy, “gotcha” journalism.  Laura Kirchner, a former Columba Journalism Review assistant editor, wrote that as a first semester student in journalism school, she was assigned the 1981 Sydney Pollack film Absence of Malice by one of the professors of the required Ethics course. As Ms. Kirchner states in a July 15, 2011 article, the reporter played by Sally Field “forgets she’s talking to actual people, people who will have to live with the effects of what she writes about them.  Two months ago, my family was personally hurt and victimized by sensationalized, fact-less speculation masquerading as journalism. I hope this serves to bring attention to the need for journalistic integrity as well as encouraging everyone to watch the spectacular and hot performances of Memphis music by Cyndi Lauper, as well as Justin Timberlake, William Bell, Steve Cropper, Sam Moore, Booker T. Jones, Queen Latifah, Ben Harper, Charlie Musselwhite, Eddie Floyd, Alabama Shakes, Joshua Ledet, and Mavis Staples on PBS next Tuesday evening.
A strange Twitter kerfuffle on a slow news day reveals the perils of the new-media landscape for politicians