Politico Retracts Story Calling Kamala Biden’s VEEP Choice… Do You Buy Their Explanation?
For a short window of time, Politico had published a story that Joe Biden had tapped Kamala as his choice of Veep.
Maybe ‘tapped’ is a poor choice of words. We ARE, after all, speaking of the woman James Woods has affectionately dubbed #HeelsUpHarris.
In a weird twist, the text of the announcement spoke using PAST tense to describe a FUTURE event.
Huh?
Politico labeled Sen. Kamala Harris as Biden's running mate… that he chose on August 1 (4 days from now).https://t.co/M3dhmIwZ7o pic.twitter.com/99GDHzWPnL
— Mark Bednar (@MarkBednar) July 28, 2020
Smells kinda fishy, dontcha think?
Don’t worry. There’s an explanation.
The outlet confirmed the report was published by mistake.
“For a brief period yesterday afternoon, placeholder text was mistakenly published to the site,” Brad Dayspring, Politico’s vice president of marketing and communications, told The Hill. “Our standard practice is to use ‘lorem ipsum’ as placeholder text. In this instance, that did not happen. We regret the error and any confusion that it caused.” —Washington Times
I dunno. That’s awfully specific for a PLACEHOLDER text, guys.
What are some more reasonable explanations?
They’re a big site. One possible explanation is that they were given a scoop and blew it by publishing it way too early.
Another possibility is that they have these sorts of stories printed ahead of time for all of the likely contenders — just like celebrity eulogies — there are multiple stories written ahead of time and updated as we go so that news agencies can just pull the file and run it.
Another possibility is that this was a ‘trial balloon’ to gauge the public reaction to Harris as his Veep pick.
And since ‘news’ agencies have LONG since ditched objectivity for partisanship, we cannot entirely rule out the possibility that someone in Politico is trying to advance the cause of their OWN preferred pick.
Which of these explanations do YOU think is the most likely?