The Media Master Race thing doesn’t work as well as some media types expect it to.

After a New York Times bigwig’s anti-Semitic posts were exposed, the paper protested that using “journalistic techniques to target journalists and news organizations… is fundamentally different from the well-established role of the news media in scrutinizing people in positions of power.”

It’s “scrutinizing” when the media does it, but “targeting” when someone else does it.

The New York Times struggles to articulate the difference between its opposition research and those of conservatives. But the one clear difference is the “well-established role of the news media.” The news media has a unique right to target people and even retaliate against journalists over a political agenda. It’s an establishment and ordinary people with Twitter accounts don’t have that same right or role.

That thinking hasn’t worked out very well for the Des Moines Register and the reporter who dug up two offensive tweets from a guy fundraising for a hospital that he wrote when he was 16. That reporter’s own offensive tweets were dug up and he was fired.

And now he’s trying the Media Master Race defense.

Calvin told BuzzFeed News these were “frankly embarrassing” tweets that he “would not have published today,” but said they had been “taken out of context” and were being used to “wield disingenuous arguments against me.”

Calvin said editors at the Des Moines Register directed him to apologize in a tweet, which he said he agreed to do because he was “afraid and just trying to comply with what I was being told so I could possibly hold onto my job.”

In the tweet, Calvin apologized for “not holding myself to the same high standards as The Register holds others.”

“I regret publishing that tweet now,” Calvin told BuzzFeed News. “Because I was never trying to hold Carson to any kind of ‘higher standard’ or any kind of standard at all. I was trying to do my job as a reporter, and I think I did so to the best of my ability.”

Digging up the tweets a twenty-something man wrote when he was 16, which have nothing to do with him fundraising for sick kids, is not the work of a reporter. It was punitive PC culture and it bit Calvin right back. There was nothing newsworthy about the tweets.

And Calvin’s claim that he was doing his job as a reporter while his critics are just being nasty and mean is nonsense.

This sort of Media Master Race garbage isn’t flying anymore.

“I recognize that I’m not the first person to be doxed like this — this whole campaign was taken up by right-wing ideologues and largely driven by that force,” he said. “It was just a taste of what I assume that women and journalists of color suffer all the time, but the kind of locality and regional virality of the story made it so intense.”

Uh-huh.

It’s doxxing and smearing when others do it to you, but it’s journalism when you do it. Sorry, no.