Bill Donohue comments on how politics affects Yahoo News:
Yahoo News is seeking to manipulate public opinion by promoting the false notion that Pope Francis is at war with Donald Trump. In doing so, it is playing games with Catholics.
Today, on the homepage of Yahoo there is a news story titled, “Trump Goes to War with the Pope”; it features a picture of Donald Trump at a podium. The first sentence reads, “The pontiff suggests that Trump is not a Christian.”
There is no news here, save for Yahoo’s deceitfulness. The story is taken from a piece posted by Politico on February 18. Not only that, as I pointed out before, both the pope and Trump were misrepresented by the media last winter.
What makes this “news” story so outrageous is not simply the attempt to create a faux controversy between the pope and Trump, it represents a pattern of corruption on the part of Yahoo. This is at least the third time it has recently run the Politico story from February on its homepage. It did so again on October 1. Prior to that it, the story appeared in the same spot on August 27.
On August 29, after correcting the record about the pope and Trump, I said the following:
“The Politico piece that was posted on August 27 on the front page of Yahoo was marked August 25, but when I clicked on the entire story, I found it was the Politico article from February 18.
“Why did Yahoo mislead its readers? How could a mistake of this gravity be made? After all, many people only read the headlines, and in this case they were given the wrong message. If it wasn’t a mistake, then there is something seriously wrong going on. Either way, Yahoo owes us an explanation.”
Yesterday, after Yahoo ran the same story on October 1, we contacted two editors asking for an explanation. No reply was forthcoming. Now they have struck again.
As I said, many Internet users only read the headline news, so by recycling this story, which was seriously flawed to begin with, Yahoo News is acting irresponsibly.
Contact Daniel Klaidman, deputy editor, Yahoo News: dklaidman@yahoo-inc.com
