“We wish Mr. Bowen the best of luck in his job application”—statement from Arab News
Let this tale be a warning to all you kids out there: don’t be a turncoat suck-up. You’ll never amount to anything, and if you do, your name will be Ted Cruz. And who the hell wants that?
I present to you Mr. Andrew Bowen, who was a weekly columnist at Arab News, an English-language media outfit in Saudi Arabia. Allegedly, he knows Trump’s pick for the State Department’s policy planning staff, and is slated to a take job there. He’s a well-connected white guy—and even has some qualifications to boot—but apparently that wasn’t enough because (brace yourself) Trump is an a**hole.
According to Mr. Bowen, in order for him “to be cleared” to work at the State Department, he had to remove articles that were offending to the Donald. You see, there are currently thousands of jobs at the state department going unfilled because Trump doesn’t want people there who have been even remotely critical of him. (This is why Elliot Abrams got nixed by Trump.) The problem here is that even the most oblivious people working in this field would have preferred Hillary as the sane choice, since Trump has shown such a frank disregard for human decency and civility.
And I mean people like Andrew, who said before the election that Trump had shown “a frank disregard for human decency and civility.” (He also called him “boorish and predatory,” among other things.)
Now, there are a couple of different ways Andrew could have handled this situation, but he decided to go the route of harassing the hell out of Arab News by making “repeated requests” to take down the offending articles, and when that didn’t work, threatened to sic “influential friends and contacts” on them.
Arab News responded by releasing the following public statement:
Arab News regrettably announces that it will discontinue publishing articles by US columnist Andrew Bowen.
The reason behind this decision is the columnist insisting that this newspaper deletes previous articles dating back prior to the recent US election where he was in favor of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton.
Bowen, a visiting scholar at the American Enterprise Institute, has repeatedly requested the removal of these articles stating that this is needed for him “to be cleared” for what he claims to be a possible job with the new Donald Trump administration’s State Department.
Mr. Bowen also insinuated — verbally and in writing — that he will seek the support of influential friends and contacts to help remove the articles.
Arab News possesses all correspondence relating to this matter and its position is that such a request is unprofessional journalistically, particularly given that there were no factual errors or libelous comments that require a redaction or correction.
We wish Mr. Bowen the best of luck in his job application.
Boo-yah!
Unfortunately, according to FP, Bowen apparently did indeed contact the Saudi government to pressure the news site into taking down his articles. Links to his former articles go to broken or “Access Denied” links. Even their statement was taken down (I retrieved it above from Mother Jones). It would appear that Bowen was successful in leaning on authoritarian government officials to subvert a free press, because that’s exactly the kind of person you would want working in our State Department.
The good news is that numerous American media outlets, from the Washington Post to the Chicago Tribune, have reported on this and now everyone knows exactly what Andrew said about Trump—and Clinton. The irony is that millions of people are reading what he wrote that wouldn’t have if he hadn’t been such a weasel.