Charles Johnson, ‘most hated man on the Internet,’ a former Kauffman Foundation intern

The World Wide Web can be a loathsome place full of nasty things — it would take no small amount of hard work to earn consideration as the “most hated man on the Internet.”

But Charles Johnson may have achieved this distinction, at least as far as Beltway media like Politico is concerned (Gawker called Johnson “the web’s worst journalist”).

Johnson might relish these descriptions, at least as far as they will garner him some notoriety. Johnson is the proprietor of GotNews.com, an upstart news site that aspires for sordid news scoops that may even be too salacious or risqué for The Drudge Report.

Lately, Johnson is in the news for his follow-up reporting on Rolling Stone’s disastrous story about rape on the campus of the University of Virginia. The magazine’s story imploded when its central anecdote of a woman named “Jackie,” who says she was gang-raped by members of a UVA fraternity in 2012, didn’t withstand post-publication scrutiny. Rolling Stone has since apologized and walked back portions of its story after discovering that some of its details of Jackie’s account didn’t add up.

It’s still not clear what actually happened to Jackie, but Johnson disclosed her real identity on GotNews.com, as well as posting screencaps of her social-media history. The tone and substance of his reporting on Jackie was seemingly meant to humiliate her, calling the woman “obsessed with rape.”

But Johnson’s schadenfreude toward Rolling Stone and Jackie was short-lived. GotNews.com had to retract one of its posts when he published a purported photo of Jackie, only to learn later that the image depicted a different woman altogether (GotNews published a correction, but the photo in question remains on the site). It was, or at least should have been, an embarrassing moment for the self-styled “champion of truth.”

“I have published hundreds of stories and sometimes make a mistake or two,” Johnson tells The Pitch, which asked him about his decision to leave the errant photo live on his site. “I think it’s important when we correct our mistakes to leave them up so that people can see how those mistakes may have been made. Jackie [last name redacted] was exposed by me as a fraud. I’m proud of the role I played.”

It wasn’t his first serious misstep, and it may not be his last.

On Charles Johnson’s personal webpage, he says he once worked at the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, the Kansas City nonprofit named after one of the city’s most beloved figures. The Pitch checked with the Kauffman Foundation to verify Johnson’s linkage there. Barbara Pruitt, Kauffman Foundation’s spokeswoman, confirmed that he had worked there as an intern for a time in then-CEO Carl Schramm’s office.

“I had a great time in Kansas City and I ate a lot of barbecue,” Johnson writes to The Pitch. “It was one of the happiest times in my life. I was there for two summers.” 

Schramm ran the Kauffman Foundation for nearly a decade until 2011. He was successful at growing the foundation during his time in Kansas City but was maligned by some segments of the local civic community, which believed the foundation wasn’t giving enough money to local causes.

The Pitch reached out to Schramm, now a professor at Syracuse University, to get his view on working with Johnson. Schramm, in a brief e-mail, describes a scholarly side of Johnson.

Schramm says Johnson was one of up to 10 college interns the Kauffman Foundation would accept for yearly summer programs. He says it was a competitive internship; one of Schramm’s interns went on to win a Rhodes Scholarship. Johnson came to the Kauffman Foundation while studying at Claremont McKenna College, a private school in Southern California.

“I got to know Charles a bit as I did most of the interns,” Schramm tells The Pitch via e-mail. “Charles worked in our research department. While he never collaborated or worked directly with me, I know Charles enjoyed a very sound reputation at Kauffman for doing good research on economic policy and/or matters relating to entrepreneurship. I have followed his career a bit. He has written a major bio of President Coolidge which I found very scholarly and competent, quite an accomplishment for a young man.”

Schramm’s recollection of Johnson is a marked contrast to the rascally, and at times hostile, image Johnson puts forth of himself on GotNews.com and his social-media rants.

Johnson’s brand of news reporting is sometimes described as ratfucking journalism, a term that draws its origins to political dirty tricks. It’s the type of news reporting that goes beyond gonzo journalism into a particularly brazen form of information gathering and attention seeking that’s punctuated with stunts and a certain bit of sleaze. In Johnson’s case, one example is his willingness to pay sources for information. Among Johnson’s predecessors in this craft are James O’Keefe and Andrew Breitbart. 

Johnson’s site solicits donations from readers, a form of journalistic subsistence that requires attention-fetching stories above all else.