WaPo Deletes Tweet Critical of Joe Biden After White House Complains
That the mainstream media are in bed, metaphorically speaking, with Democrats is not exactly breaking or new news. But when news outlets make decisions about their coverage after prompting from a Democratic official – especially those who are in senior White House positions and for seemingly no apparent reason other than the fact that the official in question didn’t like it, that definitely raises eyebrows and is worthy of a closer examination of what happened.
On Friday, the Washington Post published a piece on how President Biden makes it a point to attend and speak at the funerals of political figures, using recent examples such as the funeral for the late Sen. Bob Dole (R-Kan.) and former Bush Sec. of State Colin Powell to demonstrate how Biden is supposedly the rare and magnanimous politician who doesn’t let political labels keep him from paying his respects when the time comes (which, in reality, are characteristics that are in no way unique to Biden nor any other Democrat).
Originally, the piece was promoted as an article that was somewhat critical of Biden’s approach, at least from the perspective of unnamed staffers. Here’s a screengrab (the archived version is here) of what one tweet looked like before the WaPo deleted it:
The below screen grab shows what the mobile version once looked like. As you see in both instances, the “hook” appeared to be how people on Biden’s staff weren’t comfortable with the amount of time he spent preparing for and attending visitations and funerals:
Several hours after the critical WaPo tweet went up, White House press secretary Jen Psaki complained about it.
“I will wait here for the apparent growing chorus referenced here who are opposed (that is right opposed according to this tweet) to a @POTUS who honors the lives of those lost, with empathy and grace,” she tweeted, including a link to the original tweet.
That was at 12:30 pm ET on January 8th. Roughly two hours and 15 minutes later, the Washington Post deleted the tweet and posted a new one that simply included the text of the headline along with a link to the piece.
“We’ve deleted a tweet that inaccurately represented the scope of the story,” they explained in a subsequent tweet.
In case either of those get deleted, here are screen grabs of them:
Not only did they delete the original tweet, but it also appears they deleted any reference in the actual story to Biden’s actions on this issue creating tension among his staffers. Here’s the link to the story. If anyone can find it any such references, contact me and let me know. I read the story several times, but maybe I missed the “staffer tensions” part of it.
In other words, it appears that anything negative about the report in the actual article and on social media promotions by the WaPo was scrubbed after Jen Psaki got triggered.
It’s one thing for a media outlet to issue a correction after a political figure and/or their handlers have demonstrated beyond a shadow of a doubt that the outlet was factually incorrect. It’s another thing entirely for a media outlet to reframe a story and their promotion of it to something more favorable to that politician just because their inner circle had hurt feelings over it.
We saw a similar disturbing instance of the media colluding with Democrats to soften coverage of Biden during the 2020 presidential campaign when the New York Times admitted they changed how they described Biden’s alleged inappropriate touching of women because the Biden campaign complained about it.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist nor someone with a degree in journalism to know that this should not ever happen. The Washington Post has not explained who and/or what prompted them to make the change in both the tweet and the story, but considering their history of liberal bias, it’s not hard to understand why their critics are suggesting they made the changes in order to make the Biden White House feel better.
“Democracy dies in darkness.” Remember that, WaPo?
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