By Justin Caruso
UPDATE 5:23 PM EST: The Washington Post has added a correction to the post in question — after this article was published. The paper held off on a correction on its site for nearly two hours after acknowledging the error on Twitter. The headline on Breitbart’s story has been updated to reflect this change.
The Washington Post described Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan as “far-right” Thursday, then scrubbed the error from the article’s headline and text without acknowledging the edit.
The far-left newspaper’s coverage of Facebook’s latest move to ban controversial and anti-establishment figures linked Farrakhan with conservative activists, originally posting the headline “Facebook bans far-right leaders including Louis Farrakhan, Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos for being ‘dangerous.’”
The false label was also included in the first line of author Elizabeth Dwoskin’s article.
The publication’s official Twitter account posted the same headline with this false information. In a followup tweet, the Post said, “We have deleted this tweet because it incorrectly included Louis Farrakhan, who has espoused anti-Semitic views, in a list of far-right leaders. Facebook banned extremist figures including Farrakhan, Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos for being ‘dangerous.’”
However, the paper has not acknowledged any error on the article page itself — or told readers that its editors altered the headline, lead paragraph, and URL after publication.
Despite the stealth correction, the article has received the endorsement of NewsGuard, a Microsoft partner that marks news sources as reliable or not in a web browser extension — even on a cached version of the article with the false “far-right” label still included in the URL.
“This website adheres to all nine of NewsGuard’s standards of credibility and transparency,” a pop-up reads when users mouse over the green checkmark next to the Post‘s name. Among those criteria: “Regularly corrects or clarifies errors.”
NewsGuard similarly defended a stealth edit from corporate media in February, saying that the New York Times did not run afoul of its policy by altering a headline without acknowledging the update.
Another article published in The Atlantic about the Facebook bans used the headline “Instagram and Facebook Ban Far-Right Extremists,” with a photo of Farrakhan in the featured image. As of this writing, it has not been corrected.
Farrakhan, who has praised Adolf Hitler and promotes an anti-Semitic and black nationalist worldview, has a number of well-documented relationships with Democratic lawmakers.
Former president Barack Obama posed for a photo with Farrakhan, and Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison (D) and Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) have long associatedwith the hateful preacher.
Last October, Farrakhan said during an address that he was not an “antisemite” but an “anti-Termite.”
“So when they talk about Farrakhan, call me a hater, you know they do, call me an antisemite–stop it! I’m anti-termite! I don’t know nothing about hating somebody because of their religious preference,” he said
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