Male or Female: Washington Post Apologizes for Screw Up, Again

The Washington Post, the newspaper leading the charge in the US government’s war on “fake news,” is apologizing for the second time this week, after yet another major blunder.

On the front page of Thursday’s edition of the Washington Post Express, their free daily paper, the media outlet foolishly used a male symbol for a story about the Women’s March on Washington taking place on January 21.

— Express (@WaPoExpress) January 5, 2017

“We made a mistake on our cover this morning and we’re very embarrassed. We erroneously used a male symbol instead of a female symbol,” a representative from the Express tweeted.

— Sam Thielman (@samthielman) January 5, 2017

It seems that the Post, who has publicly stated their intention of dethroning the New York Times as America’s newspaper of record, get embarrassed pretty often.

— Express (@WaPoExpress) January 5, 2017

Earlier this week, they published a fake story claiming that Russian hackers had penetrated the US power grid through a Vermont utility.

The headline of the original story declared, “Russian operation hacked a Vermont utility, showing risk to US electrical grid security, officials say.” But the story was a fabrication, and the article, which sourced unnamed officials, was rapidly debunked as the power company stated that there was no evidence that the Russian government hacked or targeted the utility. Not only was there no penetration of the US power grid by Russia, there was no penetration by anyone. 

In December 2016, the Post added another editor’s note to yet another news story they published after facing severe backlash and legal threats.

In an ironically fake news article about “fake news,” by Craig Timberg, the Post claimed that Russian propaganda helped Donald Trump win the US presidential election. A large part of the basis for the piece was centered on evidence gleaned by the paper from an aggressively anonymous website called PropOrNot, which listed over 200 websites that they accuse of peddling what they label Russian propaganda and other false narratives. Popular news websites on all sides of the political spectrum are listed, including The Drudge Report, Zero Hedge, TruthOut, Sputnik News, and WikiLeaks.

Perhaps someone should remind the Washington Post that those without sin should cast the first stone.