On Saturday, the New York Times published a story titled A Voice of Hate in America's Heartland.

It was a profile of Tony Haveter, a 29-year-old Ohio welder, who would be rightfully described as nondescript if he weren't a hate-spewing white nationalist.

The piece by Richard Fawcett aimed not to unmask a scoundrel, but to muse on the,

at least superficially unremarkable lifestyle of the Nazi next door. I found the story terrifying.

Many others felt it was a disgrace on the grounds of normalizing and even glorifying hate.

The outcry provoked a reaction from the Times which offered regret about hurt feelings,

but defended the journalism. Although, as Fawcett himself confessed in an accompanying first-person

piece to his profile, it offered no insight into how Haveter became what he became.

Among the critics was BuzzFeed's Charlie Worsell, who thinks the Times piece failed to adequately

contextualize the ravings of an avowed Nazi. Charlie, welcome back to OTM. Thank you for having me.

So The Times puts out this feature by

Richard Fawcett on the Nazi next door, Tony Hovatter. And in about 10 seconds, Twitter blows up

with outrage. Before we discuss the merits Fawcett's journalism and your follow-up, why the freak out?

I think that there's a real sensitivity right now towards the coverage of and the attention,

the amount of attention focused on far-right extremists. I think a lot of people feel that there is a disproportionate amount of

coverage that doesn't interrogate them or label them properly or have enough outrage about them.

There seems to be a desire on sort of behalf of the media policeman of Twitter when you write

about a far-right extremist or a neo-Nazi to express outrage

in every sentence or every paragraph or, you know, to make sure in all caps to say, this is not

normal. Well, let's talk about error, if there was any. You certainly felt that Fawcett's reporting

was lacking in at least one major area.

Yeah, the thing that struck me, not just reading the piece, but also reading the follow-up that Fawcett wrote himself about the behind the scenes of the story, was that he set out to answer a question that's pretty admirable, which is how does a seemingly normal young man

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