Conservative Blogger’s Attempt to Burn Journalist Connie Schultz Backfires

U.S. News and World Report reports that Connie Schultz, a Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated columnist formerly with the Cleveland Plain Dealer, received the following email from a conservative blogger on July 9, 2012:

Dear Ms. Shultz,

We are doing an expose on journalists in the elite media who socialize with elected officials they are assigned to cover. We have found numerous photos of you with Sen. Sherrod Brown. In one of them, you appear to be hugging him.

Care to comment?

Here’s her response, dated July 10, 2012:

Dear Mr. [Name Deleted]:

I am surprised you did not find a photo of me kissing U.S. Sen. Sherrod Brown so hard he passes out from lack of oxygen. He’s really cute.

He’s also my husband.

You know that, right?

You can find the exchange on her Facebook page. She has yet to receive a response.

Ms. Schultz seems to have a fair bit of journalistic integrity. According to U.S. News and World Report, she left the Cleveland Plain Dealer when it “become painfully clear that my independence, professionally and personally, is possible only if I’m no longer writing for the newspaper that covers my husband’s senate race on a daily basis.”

Also notable is the fact that she hasn’t named the blogger. The Cleveland Plain Dealer reports:

Schultz said this morning that she hasn’t named the blogger because she wants him to “pick better company and do better journalism.”

“I don’t want to be a bully,” she said in a telephone interview. “I can say he was working for one of the larger conservative blogs, but that his name is not in the staff directory. Maybe he’s an intern, maybe an editor was playing a joke on him or maybe he was trying to get a reaction out of me.

Integrity and grace. Thanks for setting an example, Ms. Schultz!