Police called to National Theatre to deal with gender critical feminists sitting on chairs

[Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g]

twitter.com/DadRogd/status/1147181198231429124 has picture of the unfortunate police officer sent to investigate.

Earlier in his tweet thread he says:

National Theatre Green Room bar just refused to serve us. Their grounds? Allegedly, we are a political group with views a member of staff finds offensive. So they offend a dozen customers instead.

Problem is apparently with t-shirt worn by Anne Ruzylo sporting a dictionary definition of a lesbian. As someone else has pointed out the NT is in breach of the Equality Act, given that sexual orientation and sex are both protected characteristics. I wonder how this will play out.

Can I just say that contacting someone on Twitter and only attempting to contact said person on there when one seeks an urgent comment for an article is a dereliction of duty for any self-respecting journalist.

I may not be working as a journalist right now, but I write plenty of articles for clients, including ones where I need to contact people I do not know and have no contact details for. In my experience, there are now a great many ways to find a person, even at short notice. Especially a person as well known as Anne Ruzylo.

Finding completely private people who are not professionally, socially or politically active, may be well nigh impossible in that time frame, but Anne Ruzylo is quite well known. Even the Guardian has previously written about her (at least twice), so has the Times and the Economist, the Metro and all kinds of other old and new media outlets.

So conspiracy theories these may be - although that's a rather grandiose framing of the question whether a journalist doing a hack job was sufficiently motivated to pay more than lip service to the notion of fair reporting standards and her obligation to strive for accuracy as per the Editor's Code of Conduct.

I honestly think that the situation as it transpired allows one to assume she was not sufficiently motivated. Whether she outright lied, pretended or was genuinely mistaken I am not in any position to know.

She sure as hell didn't meet professional standards though.

Have you never emailed someone and made a typo in the address? And it pings back to you?

Yes, but twitter is not the same as email. If shes already on the wuote, just clicking reply on the quote would get her to reply to the actual account. Yes, you can type out the name, but why on earth anyone would assume sargesalute had an i instead of an l..or not just copy and paste the name if unsure..is utterly beyond me.

However you seem to have a vested interest in trying to make out it was an honest mistake. And I cannot really be arsed in going over the same ground over and over. Should have left when I said I would really but could not resist replying to he posts I did tbh.

So yeah, again agree to disagree, but you 'win' anyway, as seem a lot more invested in this than I am. I am simply someone who finds it hard to believe a journalist made that kind of 'mistake', especially when considering the biased article (thats still not updated despite her now being very aware that its lies) and where it was too. Again, on the very small chance I am wrong and it WAS a genuine mistake, then she is really shit at her job. However, I figure she did her job exactly right. Not getting the other side of the story AND setting up an out so she could claim innocence. Quite clever really I think.

But I am interested in seeing what other things come of this, what other excuses are made and such..so will follow the thread but refrain from posting until the subject changes I think. Probably for the best. especially as am heavily medicated now, where I was not earlier so posts may not make as much sense!

tobee You keep forgetting that in order to get this wrong, the journalist had to write the word salute by misspelling it in an utterly bizarre way that resulted in her writing saiute but with a capital i to make it look like salute. There is no keyboard combination that allows for that to be a typo. Especially after having no trouble finding the genuine account and quoting its tweets.

I don't even know if either Sargesalute or Anne Razulo were named by either the police or the National Theatre

But that is completely irrelevant. The journalist by the time she was writing the article had got hold of the name "Anne Ruzylo". The journalist wanted to contact Anne Ruzylo.

All she needed to do was Google "Anne Ruzylo Twitter" and click on a link in the Twitter feed.

Lass it's not irrelevant because you were talking about the speed with which you found them in the first place forearmed with Anne's name, and possibly twitter handle.

Charlie they clicked on the link I assume, as I did, to message Anne. The link was already written out. So you would not be deliberately spell the twitter handle in a bizarre way. I keep writing that. I don't keep forgetting that at all.

I don't have a twitter account so I'm searching without being logged in but when I type 'anne ruzylo' into the search box it gives me one result and it's the fake account.

If fact weirdly no combination of anne ruzylo, anne ruzylo xx or sargesalute brings up an auto suggestion of her actual account. To access the real account I have to click through to results and find a tweet she has made or is tagged in.

That's roughly what I did.

Lassit's not irrelevant because you were talking about the speed with which you found them in the first place forearmed with Anne's name, and possibly twitter handle

You are making no sense whatsoever.

The journalist was aware of the name Anne Ruzylo because she was writing an article which contained a reference to a person called Ruzylo. She was , as you put it "forearmed". We don't know where or how she became aware of the name but she was aware of it.

Having become aware of that name she could have done what any other person on the planet would have done and Googled "Anne Ruzylo Twitter"

I don't have a twitter account so I'm searching without being logged in but when I type 'anne ruzylo' into the search box it gives me one result and it's the fake account

I don't have a Twitter account either.

This is my Google result for "Anne Ruzylo Twitter"

Anne's genuine account is the first result.

Yes, Ovahere, I get the same. But it is immediately obvious that this account has sent only five tweets in total, none of which is the one tweet that the journalist is quoting in her story.

It is indeed entirely possible to arrive at the fake account by searching Twitter for Anne Ruzylo. It is not possible to quote from the real account and then contact the fake one by accident (I mean she might have done and then found the real account afterwards in which case, of course, a conscientious reporter would send the contact request again.)

Googling her name, as LassofFyvie did, brings up the real account btw.

Interestingly I've just tried it again Las. And got the same result as you. I'm not sure why although I know google gives people different results at different times depending on the most things people are clicking on iyswim. In fact I heard the CEO of google confirmed this in an interview the other day coincidentally.

I still don't think it's likely that the journalist did it deliberately but maybe I'm excessively naive.

I also don't think what I says makes no sense, applying a small bit of knowledge and imagination as to what information journalists are given when starting a story. Naturally I agree that we don't know when the journalist elicited the name.

Being a bit of a dog with a bone about this.

also don't think what I says makes no sense, applying a small bit of knowledge and imagination as to what information journalists are given when starting a story

The information the journalist was given was the name Anne Ruzylo. You were trying to make some point that the name was not in the NT tweet. That is irrelevant because somehow from somewhere the journalist got the name.

You were then trying to argue that I had no difficulty in finding the correct account because I was "forearmed". I was no more or less "forewarned than the journalist was.

The reason it’s hard to tell whether it’s deliberate or very shoddy/sloppy journalism is because the Guardian/Observer has form with both, particularly when it comes to reporting lesbians. See for examples, the reporting of Martina Navratilova’s comments, the reporting of Get the L Out, failure to report the homophobia at Lancaster Pride, failure to report the lesbophobia of the trans movement generally.

Why hasn't the article hasn't been updated now that the journalist has the correct details?

I wonder... hoping it disappears in the flurry of rainbow photos from pride.

I'm not getting into the argument about how the journalist could have made that mistake but I can't for the life of me see how there are any more than two possible explanations for her failure to get the right Twitter account.

1. She did it deliberately. I think this is unlikely. I hope so, anyway, because if we've reached the point where an Observer journalist is deliberately lying we're done for.

1. She was amazingly sloppy. Can't see any way round that. It may be that she saw the possibility of reporting on this, spent hours on Saturday begging and pleading to be allowed to get it into print and was then up against an impossible deadline, but even so, it's ended up being a one-sided story that uncritically repeats what the NT said without any common sense being applied at all.

Anne had tweeted and others had tagged her in repeatedly on the initial threat started on Friday evening by @DadRogd on Twitter. The journalist could have clicked straight through from lots of tweets there to Anne's real Twitter account. But instead she searched for it (why?) and got the fake Twitter account.

Surely anybody trying to make contact with the accountholder, not just a trained journalist, would have a look at the account first to see what was going on? And if you do that, anyone with any knowledge at all of this debate would spot that it wasn't the right account, from the banner alone.

Even if that didn't strike her, why would you assume that someone who's hardly ever tweeted would be on Twitter to get a direct message in time to respond before an imminent press deadline?

And why on earth didn't she grasp from perusal of Twitter that there were photos and almost certainly video footage of what happened that were totally at odds with the NT's statement?

And finally - don't the Observer worry about libel any more? I thought national newspapers kept lawyers on standby to go through controversial stories to make sure the paper only prints what it can stand up in court. This misses that by a country mile, I'd say.

Guardian/Observer readers/journos seem to be a lost cause these days. I can't see why anyone is surprised at a one-sided report.

Let's not get side-lined here - the real story we should be concentrating on is the blatant lesbophobia on display here. I hope those asked to leave take this further.

If you're a journalist and you don't want to get in trouble for defaming someone, you get their fucking Twitter right. It's not fucking difficult.

I think that's the conclusion we need to draw: a slapdash journalist has absolutely no worries about potentially defaming a lesbian because demonising lesbians has become completely normal in this political climate.

It's just what you do.

Is she a real journalist or one of these new dangled I blog/tweet therefore I am a Real Joirnalist? This wouldn’t have happened in the old days...

Gasp0deTheW0nderD0g
You give a very good summary of the journalists failings in her attempt to contact Anne, it makes quite a compelling argument for possibility 1.

Anne's question about why the journalist didn't follow and DM her remains unanswered. I don't have a Twitter account so although I can access accounts to read I'm not particularly familiar with the platform. Presumably DM's are private which would mean there would be no publicly viewable evidence of the journalists attempt to contact Anne if she had followed and DM'd the fake account. I'm making an assumption about DM's, is that how it works?

It looks like Anne Ruzylo's real Twitter account by has been shadowbanned by Twitter, to some extent at least https://shadowban.eu/sargesalute

As oval said, if you search for Anne Ruzylo in Twitter, only the fake account comes up. If you have a Twitter account, you're more likely to search for someone within twitter than go out to search from Google.

My money is on sloppy journalism rather than a deliberate move.

But the journalist had already quoted Anne's tweet from Anne's real account. In the article. It is right there. It is quoted verbatim.

How did the journalist actually manage to do that if the journalist couldn't find Anne's real Twitter account?

So clearly she managed to find Anne's real Twitter account. She copied and pasted the Tweet into the article. 5 minutes later couldn't find Anne's real Twitter account to ask for her version of events.

Popchyk
So clearly she managed to find Anne's real Twitter account. She copied and pasted the Tweet into the article. 5 minutes later couldn't find Anne's real Twitter account to ask for her version of events.

This^

Also wouldn't a journalist of integrity, committed to reporting rather than writing the news be mortified that their error had denied someone a right to reply and offer to amend the article to include Anne's comments?

You can always check sources by looking at who is @- ing SargeSalute - that’s how I found her real account- clicking on @‘s to her from other likely people.

I suppose we could discuss for hours how this might have happened but, to my mind, it’s done.

The only concern regarding the twitter handle now is
Why hasn’t a deliberately false account name been reported and removed?
Why has the article not been corrected now that Anne has been contacted?