Meet the Reporter Who Got Kicked Off Twitter for Revealing Identity of Ebola Infected Nurse

Investigative journalist and author Charles C. Johnson – founder and Editor-in-Chief of independent news site GotNews.com – explains the background behind getting the boot from Twitter for identifying Dallas-based nurse Nina Pham, who is currently being treated for Ebola.

Johnson said much of the media was reluctant to “push the envelope” too much and decided to withhold the nurse’s identity, which he was first to publicly name.

“I had a lot of journalists contact me and said, ‘Yeah, we had her name, but just didn’t reveal it – we wanted to wait for the family to give us the permission to report it. And to me that’s kind of weird, all of these people are raising money for her, I was the first person to publish that photo. I also published her Pintrest, where she talks about being a nurse.”

He said the publication of that information helped humanize her, and thereafter other media outlets like CNN and others were quick to jump on the Pintrest account that he first made public. “We’re all on social media now, we all have Internet presence, and we really kind of want to know who these people are,” Johnson said about his publishing philosophy.

“And when you publish somebody’s address, you publish somebody’s location who has Ebola, you’re not telling everyone, ‘Hey, go and break into this person’s house.’ You’re saying, ‘Hey, watch out, this could be your neighbor – and I think people want to know that,” he said.

“Look, if this was your neighbor, if this was the guy across the hall from you, if this is your co-worker, you’d probably want to know that they were sick, so that you could take necessary precautions.”

He said he understands that there are people who condemn him for releasing the personal information of various individuals who’ve been reluctantly thrust into the media spotlight.

“There have also been people who’ve said, ‘Thank you for doing this, as somebody who lives in Dallas, I live like a block from this lady – thank you.’ My attitude is, I think the information should be free and open to the public. I understand there’s going to be some controversies that come as a result of it.”

But he says he has a problem with Twitter’s policy to suspend people who expose personal details of others on the social network. “Spike Lee published the wrong address hoping to target George Zimmerman’s family,” he said. “He published the wrong address of another couple – and the purpose of that was to intimidate those people. I think that’s deplorable.” Johnson said Spike Lee was not kicked off Twitter for the disclosure.

“I’m not by any means saying that anyone should be targeted ever – I abhor all violence, vigilante violence, it’s terrible. But I do think people have a right to know in their communities.”

Speaking about the round-the-clock coverage of the Ebola situation on CNN and other TV news outlets, Johnson said he understands the reasons the story is being covered from all angles.

But he believes he offers people an alternative to traditional media sources. “There’s a reason people like me exist, to kind of inject things into the conversation that otherwise do not exist.”

He added: “But they (CNN) also serve a purpose, which is they have much more respectability, they have a much larger presence, they have to reach a global audience. They have a lot of higher costs – all these things I don’t have to deal with.”

Watch the full episode to also hear Johnson’s perspective on the news reporting that occurred in Ferguson, Missouri in the wake of the shooting death of Michael Brown, plus his views on the practice of “checkbook journalism.”