The WaPo attempt at damage control over its al-Baghdadi headline is not going very well

Greg P. | 4:30 PM on October 27, 2019

Washington Post Vice President Kristine Coratti Kelly offered up this lame tweet on her paper’s atrocious al-Baghdadi headline:

Regarding our al-Baghdadi obituary, the headline should never have read that way and we changed it quickly.

— Kristine Coratti Kelly (@kriscoratti) October 27, 2019

That’s. . . not even close to be good enough:

It didn’t “read” that way. It was “written” that way. https://t.co/UZUa7woZ7q

— Jesse Kelly (@JesseKellyDC) October 27, 2019

The passive voice in this tweet is bad enough; use of "should never have read" is complete abdication of respnsibility for editorial choice.#DoBetter https://t.co/4X7DKikSeh

— Jonathan H. Adler (@jadler1969) October 27, 2019

So, who wrote it?

So it wrote itself?

Just stop https://t.co/CpKtnb5lkz

— John Cardillo (@johncardillo) October 27, 2019

And all the other steps along the way:

Someone wrote it, an editor approved it, and someone else made the decision to publish it.

You all just didn’t expect the backlash so you’re lying your way out of it. https://t.co/CpKtnb5lkz

— John Cardillo (@johncardillo) October 27, 2019

Will there be any transparency on just how this made it online?

Hi Kristine, because your industry is super serial in transparency and honesty, perhaps you and the Washington Post would like to tell your readers exactly how that headline gets published, in the interest of Democracy not dying in darkness. https://t.co/v963fiVdFq

— Stephen Miller (@redsteeze) October 27, 2019

What about the rest of it?

What about the body of the obituary that fawned over a terrorist's love of soccer and remembered him as just a Middle Class kid who biked around with his beloved "religious books"?https://t.co/rN3HuAJWqT

— Elizabeth Harrington (@LizRNC) October 27, 2019