Just two days after the Associated Press got roasted for its headline about “two interpretations” of Jan. 6 from Trump and Biden, The New York Times is taking the heat for similar headlines on the anniversary of Jan. 6.
With the headline “Clashing Over Jan. 6, Trump and Biden Show Reality Is at Stake in 2024,” the Times prompted critics like Mark Jacob, an ex-editor at The Chicago Tribune and The Chicago Sun-Times to take to X (formerly Twitter) to express their disappointment. “The New York Times must have a policy to produce “safe,” generic headlines about the fascist Republican menace. My short thread 6 days ago took note of it,” Jacob tweeted.
In a Dec. 30 thread, Jacob pointed out Times headlines that he said were “incompetent” and favored or played to the right wing. “The New York Times writes fact-based stories and then undersells them with vague, cowardly headlines. It’s not an accident. It’s a marketing decision to go soft when the facts look bad for Team Trump. NYT doesn’t want to anger the right wing,” he tweeted at the start of the thread.
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The Associated Press got flamed Thursday for the headline, “One attack, two interpretations: Biden and Trump both make the Jan. 6 riot a political rallying cry,” which critics accused as “bothsidesism.”
Senator Cortez Masto (D-NV.) tweeted the headline writing, “Donald Trump incited an insurrection on Jan. 6th in an attempt to overthrow our democracy and stop the peaceful transfer of power. There is no other ‘interpretation’ of this.” Tom Nichols from The Atlantic added to the outcry, captioning a link to the article on X, “Dear God, this is a real headline.”
Just days earlier, AP acknowledged its own faulty headline on Claudine Gay’s Harvard resignation. Originally headlined, “Harvard president’s resignation highlights new conservative weapon against colleges: plagiarism,” it was changed to “Plagiarism charges downed Harvard’s president. A conservative attack helped to fan the outrage.” VP of AP Lauren Easton later told Fox News that “the story doesn’t meet our standards.”
