Washington Post owned Slate.com used a crude misogynist wordplay to call Sarah Palin a c*** in a headline for an article published Tuesday about a supposed secret Sarah Palin Facebook account.
The headline read: Sarah Palin Uses Alternate Facebook Accunt to Praise Sarah Palin.
The article, posted in Slate’s “Slatest” section, is based on an article from Wonkette titled, Sarah Palin Has Secret ‘Lou Sarah’ Facebook Account To Praise Other Sarah Palin Facebook Account, that in a rare show of class for Wonkette does not use the sexist slur in the article.
Several commmenters at Slatest criticized Slate for the slur. Others, however, cheered: “”Accunt” lol, Perfect. No accident.” And “Accunt is a just made up word — like refudiate.”
Given Slate’s prominence as a respected part of the mainstream media with professional standards to uphold, an innocent typo of this magnitude with this subject is highly unlikely. (For the benefit of Media Matters senior blogger Eric Boehlert, try to imagine Slate “accidentally” doing the same to Michelle Obama or Nancy Pelosi. It wouldn’t happen.)
A check of the home pages of Slate and Slatest revealed perfection in dozens of headlines–except for the one about Sarah Palin. The layout of Slate features an above the fold box with the latest headlines from Slatest which means that the “Accunt” headline was prominently featured yesterday Slate’s homepage.
Slate editor David Plotz issued a statement to Big Journalism Wednesday morning stating the headline was a “mistake” and “not intended.”
“It’s embarrassing. It’s a mistake, and of course we didn’t intend it. It slipped by our corrections monitoring yesterday night. We’re correcting it now.”
The headline has been corrected and a notice appended to the article admitting the use of the slur:
“Correction, Feb. 23: This post’s headline originally included a profanity. It has been fixed.”
No apology to Palin was issued by Plotz or Slate.
During the 2008 presidential campaign, liberal activists paraded in public wearing t-shirts emblazoned in large lettering, “Sarah Palin is a c***” with the c-word fully spelled out.
Last month, as reported by Big Journalism, Slate’s parent company The Washington Post engaged in online political activism against Sarah Palin by launching an anti-Palin Twitter campaign accompanied by an anti-Palin logo.
The Slate article itself does not bear a timestamp, but the comments begin at “Yesterday, 5:18:42 p.m.” indicating the article with the offensive headline was up for approximately eighteen hours before being corrected after being queried about it by Big Journalism.
Palin denied having a secret Facebook account, writing on her official Facebook page “On a side note, there’s always buzz about fake Sarah Palin Facebook and Twitter accounts. Please know that this is my only authentic Facebook account and SarahPalinUSA is my only authentic Twitter account. Pay no attention to the fake accounts and their fake messages.”