The Washington Post’s Boy King – editorial intern Steven Stein – has been seething over our exposure of his presence at the newspaper. So when we blogged about MCGEO’s handing out a flyer outing him, we were not surprised to see a counter-attack in the comment section. We originally thought it was Stein himself, but we were wrong. Today we reveal the identity of Stein’s minion and heap even more embarrassment on the Washington Post.
The key to unraveling the mystery is the email address used by “Xavier Shepherd”: serpico1127@gmail.com. Here is what a Google search on serpico1127 yields.
Clicking on the first entry produces this Twitter record identifying the address with one Andrew Carlin.
Carlin happens to be a former colleague of Stein’s at the Emory Wheel campus newspaper.
Stein himself mentions “my friend Andrew Carlin, a Chicago resident,” in the very last post on his now-defunct blog.
On Facebook, Stein calls himself “Hamlet Hamlet.”
No one should be surprised that Andrew Carlin is one of his Facebook friends.
Carlin has never worked at the Washington Post, so how would he be able to make this statement in his comment?
In point of fact, every editorial that goes to print is reported out and that includes talking to the unions. Moreover, four of the people on the Post’s editorial board live in Montgomery County. Many of them reported on local politics; one of whom was even the Metro editor.
Of course, his source is Steven Stein himself. That also explains why “Xavier” was ignorant of the work produced by longtime editorial writers Lee Hockstader and Bob Asher, both of whom preceded Stein.
As for Stein, he is busy covering his tracks. He deleted his LinkedIn profile listing his position as “intern.”
Luckily, it is still available in Google cache and we saved the original as a screenshot.
So the Washington Post has never commented on our story but its intern sends a juvenile lackey to troll this blog under a false name. These actions disgrace the august institution of Graham, Bradlee, Woodward and Bernstein. Where are Steven Stein’s supervisors?
The Post now faces three choices:
1. Justify to its Maryland readers why an intern who is less than one year out of school, has never before lived in our metro area and behaves like a bratty child is qualified to write our editorials.
2. Remove the intern and install an experienced veteran like Hockstader or Asher at the editorial desk.
3. Become even more of a laughingstock among our political class than they are now.
Update: Just like Stein, Andrew Carlin has tried to cover his tracks by deleting his Twitter page. It is truly shocking that such infantile behavior is tolerated by the management of the Washington Post. See the screenshot of the deleted page below.
