WaPo Deletes Tweet, but Their 'Apology' Makes It Even Worse

WaPo Deletes Tweet, but Their 'Apology' Makes It Even Worse On Thursday, Facebook announced it was banning several extremist leaders from its social media service. The Washington Post, always on top of the news, quickly posted a story about “far-right” figures being excised from the platform. The two big names from the right that ended up getting expunged are Alex Jones, the Infowars conspiracy theorist/ranine sexuality expert, and Milo Yiannopoulos, the former Breitbart editor in the midst of a multi-year odyssey to discover how low the deep end goes. There are certainly debates to be had about erosion of free speech and the slippery slope, about how to tackle fringe voices on private media platforms, about whether social media firms constitute a thought monopoly. That’s not what we’ll be examining here. What we will be examining instead is The Washington Post’s initial headline, which played like a demented game of “One of these things is not like the others”: Far-right leader Louis Farrakhan? Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan — one of the most rebarbative and identifiable hate-figures on the left — has somehow been transmuted into a man of the far-right. This was obviously in error, and the WaPo corrected it. Here’s the editor’s note at the top of the retitled article: “Louis Farrakhan is an extremist leader who has espoused anti-Semitic views.” Yes, that’s accurate. “An earlier version of this story and headline incorrectly included him in a list of far-right leaders.” Furthermore, The Washington Post wasn’t even the only publication to make this error. The Atlantic made the selfsame “mistake.”

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