Bill Donohue comments on a prominently posted news story found on Yahoo on August 27:
On Saturday morning, I found a news story on the homepage of Yahoo that was puzzling. Titled, “Trump Goes to War with the Pope,” it featured a picture of Donald Trump at a podium. The first sentence read, “The pontiff suggests that Trump is not a Christian.” That sounded very familiar.
Didn’t the pope make the same comment last winter? I remember doing a lot of media on this issue, finding it necessary to correct the record: both the pope and Trump were misrepresented. So did the two titans really clash this time? Apparently so.
In fact, they never did. 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.
Contact Daniel Klaidman, deputy editor, Yahoo News: dklaidman@yahoo-inc.com
