2020 Election

'You fail': Washington Post slammed for 'terrible headline' about Trump journalist event

David McAfee
August 1, 2024 8:51AM ET

The Washington Post said after Donald Trump's interview at a Black journalist conference that it was Vice President Kamala Harris, and not the ex-president, who is facing a "pivotal moment," leading to widespread criticism from the paper's readers.

The outlet's headline after the event at which Trump accused Harris of faking being Black to appeal to voters was, "Harris faces a pivotal moment as Trump questions her identity."

This led journalist Jeff Jarvis to set the record straight on X.

ALSO READ: Bad news for Trump: Harris will bring the receipts on Dobbs abortion decision

"No, G--------, WashPost, it's not on her. It's on him and you," he said Wednesday. "She faces nothing but racism and misogyny. You, as editors, face the test of how you will deal with that. You fail."

Julie Rodin Zebrak, a veteran D.C. attorney and political consultant, said in response to Jarvis, "Love seeing y'all stand up for [Harris]."

Norm Ornstein, emeritus scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and co-author of the bestselling books "One Nation After Trump: A Guide for the Perplexed, the Disillusioned, the Desperate, and the Not-Yet Deported" and "It's Even Worse Than It Looks: How the American Constitutional System Collided with the New Politics of Extremism," simply said, "This is just disgraceful."

Mother Jones editor David Corn replied, "Terrible headline."

"'Questioning' is a neutral verb," he wrote. "This doesn't convey Trump's racism."

Political affairs analyst and businessman David Rothkopf separately said, "If journalists do not call racists racists, liars liars, and criminals criminals they are actively aiding the racists, liars, and criminals by minimizing or recasting and normalizing the indefensible. And it happens every day."

Jarvis ultimately noted that the Post changed its title to "Trump's attack on Harris's racial identity moves contest into new phase."

"The Post rewrote this headline and made it worse insofar as it backed farther away from just telling the truth: Trump made a racist attack on Harris," Jarvis wrote. "'Contest into new phase'? That is the editors' attempt to say less: i.e., nothing. The Post is broken."

He continued:

"This is not just one headline It is overarching editorial failure. On this same story, here is another headline The Post ran. 'Tussle.' 'Raucous.' No, racist. If the editor and publisher do not know or cannot bear to tell the truth, they need to go. This is not an entertainment story. It is the essence of the United States. My kindest interpretation is that these British news executives don't know. More likely and worse, they choose not to."

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