-By Warner Todd Huston
Yahoo! News raised the ire of liberals with a June 21 article that seems to have accidentally stated that Kenya was the “the country of Obama’s birth.”
The article was quickly changed, of course, but not before people noticed and not before Twitter became filled with outrage.
The piece, written by Rachel Rose Hartman, was headlined “White House doesn’t have ‘figure on costs’ of Africa trip,” and noted in the first paragraph that Obama was visiting Africa. “But he won’t be stopping in the country of his birth,” the paragraph ended.
Screenshot of article in its original form
Obama’s African trip has him visiting South Africa, Senegal, and Tanzania. But he won’t be visiting Kenya. Naturally with that opening line, many assumed that writer Hartman was talking about Kenya, the long rumored land of the President’s birth.
The outrage rose quickly at the intimation that Obama was born in Africa, of course. The Twitter mob was soon calling for Hartman’s job.
Needless to say, the Yahoo! article was soon changed. The first paragraph now ends saying, “but he won’t be stopping in his ancestral homeland.”
To Yahoo!’s credit a disclaimer leads the article now. “Correction: An earlier version of this story incorrectly identified the president’s birthplace,” it reads.
It was likely just a bad turn of phrase. After all, the same writer wrote an anti-birther piece in 2011 that essentially calls birthers racists.
Regardless, it is an amusing muff up, isn’t it?
____________
“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that he wrote articles on U.S. history for several small American magazines. His political columns are featured on many websites such as Andrew Breitbart’s BigGovernment.com, BigHollywood.com, and BigJournalism.com, as well as RightWingNews.com, RightPundits.com, CanadaFreePress.com, StoptheACLU.com, AmericanDaily.com, among many, many others. Mr. Huston is also endlessly amused that one of his articles formed the basis of an article in Germany’s Der Spiegel Magazine in 2008.
For a full bio, please CLICK HERE.