The tweet seemed harmless enough to David Karpf. The associate professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University took
a story that bedbugs had infested the New York Times newsroom as an occasion to dig at his least favorite Times writer, the conservative columnist Bret Stephens.
"The bedbugs are a metaphor,"
Karpf wrote Monday. "The bedbugs are Bret Stephens."
The tweet got nine likes and zero retweets, Karpf said. So the professor was surprised when an email from Stephens popped a few hours later.
Then, he noticed his provost at GWU was copied on the email. And Stephens was furious.
"I'm often amazed about the things supposedly decent people are prepared to say about other people — people they've never met — on Twitter. I think you've set a new standard,"
Stephens wrote. "I would welcome the opportunity for you to come to my home, meet my wife and kids, talk to us for a few minutes, and then call me a 'bedbug' to my face. That would take some genuine courage and intellectual integrity on your part."
