Ben Jacobs, the Guardian reporter who recently found himself on the business end of a body slam from GOP candidate Greg Gianforte in Montana, has found himself a bright side to the entire ordeal. He’ll now go down as a permanent part of news history. Well, not him, exactly, but the glasses that got demolished in the ordeal will be forever remembered, even long after this weird time in politics has slipped into history.
Jacobs has decided to donate his broken spectacles to The Newseum, a museum in Washington, D.C. that is dedicated to moments in journalism history, after the institution reached out and requested as much.
Of course, the broken glasses had become sort of a celebrity in their own right even before The Newseum brought up the subject. Last Thursday, a GoFundMe page was launched to help buy the assaulted reporter a new pair of eyes. As of today, the donations had reached nearly $8,000, but the money won’t be going towards a new pair of glasses for Jacobs, for his insurance has already covered that cost. In lieu of using the funds for himself, Jacobs has asked that all the money raised go, quite fittingly, to the Committee to Protect Journalists.
I told them to give all the money to CPJ https://t.co/kxOOEjg9JS
— Ben Jacobs (@Bencjacobs) May 26, 2017
As for Gianforte, he also got a going away present from the incident — a misdemeanor assault charge he will have to deal with in the near future. It’s not all bad news for him, of course, since Montana voters made him the newest elected member of Congress, which is only the latest thing that makes no sense in 2017.
(Via The Guardian, The Washington Examiner and USA Today)