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Was it done deliberately to stir up trouble? Or are there just so many diversity hires at the Washington Post that accurate news reporting is now impossible?

Those are the questions people are asking after the Washington Post tweeted that George Floyd was “shot and killed in police custody”.

A court found that Floyd, whose death sparked riots across America, was killed by a policeman kneeling on his neck.

The policeman, Derek Chauvin, was convicted of second-degree murder and sentenced to 22 years and six months in prison.

But if you believe the Washington Post, Floyd had been shot dead by police.

Will the Post use the third anniversary of Floyd’s death to report that he was mowed down by a sub-machine gun while ice-skating?

Error Undetected

The concern was not just that the tweet was wrong. How did something so wildly inaccurate get so far at the Post?

Was it an auto-correct thing?

Diligent journalist carefully types “George Floyd died after a police officer kneeled on his neck for more than 9 minutes” and it comes out as “George Floyd was shot and killed”.

If you believe that, you’ll believe anything you read in the Washington Post.

But the brazen factual error begs the question; if the Washington Post is so casual about reporting something 95% of people know to be wrong, what other falsehoods do they report as truths?

And where is Joe Biden’s Disinformation Governance Board when it is needed?

Apology Absent

The Washington Post issued a hastily written non-correction when angry readers wondered aloud if the newspaper was deliberately trying to stir racial tensions by printing false narratives.

I have to say, this is one of the strangest explanations I’ve ever read.

It sounds like three linguistic specialists, a public relations firm, and a pack of lawyers came up with this bizarre statement. It glows that brightly.

Instead of saying ‘We wrongly reported that George Floyd was shot’, the Post simply said they had deleted a previous tweet ‘that included language that was changed after publish’.

Huh?

When did Kamala Harris start moonlighting at the Post?

At least the lie was grammatically correct. The explanation made no sense at all. It was certainly a weird way to say “we published fake news”.

It’s possible, of course, that what they were trying to say was ‘we mislead the public to try to advance an agenda’.

This is how respected publications go from “newspaper of record” to birdcage liner.

When you can’t get the most basic facts right about the biggest story in decades, you should probably pack up and cease to exist.

On the plus side, the Washington Post never hesitates to use its in-house fact checkers to make sure readers don’t believe anything it doesn’t want them to believe.

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Originally published at The James Macpherson Report.
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