The Associated Press Deleted a Badly Misleading Tweet About JD Vance After I Called Them Out.

We in the media need to get back to calling balls and strikes -- fairly and accurately.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

On Thursday evening, I ran across an Associated Press article on Twitter about Republican vice presidential candidate JD Vance’s response to the tragic Georgia school shooting in Winder.

The Tweet originally read “JD Vance says school shootings are a ‘fact of life,’ calls for better security.” The headline of the piece was similar.

A fact of life? As if the deaths of our children and faculty is just something we have to learn to deal with?

Understandably the AP Tweet soon populated with angry replies. How could the Republicans be so callous? So cruel? Is their attachment to America’s guns that deep and unyielding?

But then I clicked through and read the article. What I found was a completely different context than you might expect from the Tweet and headline.

Vance’s full quote is:

I don’t like that this is a fact of life. But if you are a psycho and you want to make headlines, you realize that our schools are soft targets. And we have got to bolster security at our schools.

With context, the quote reads entirely differently. He doesn’t like that school shootings have become routine — a fact of life — in our country. And he wants to respond to this by increasing security in American schools.

If you read yesterday’s post, you’ll know I don’t find this to be a super compelling argument. School shootings are rare. Why are we militarizing schools over rare events? What does this do to our children?

But despite my disagreement with Vance, I don’t want the press misleading people about what he’s saying.

So I took to Twitter and called them out, telling them they need to fix the headline and Tweet. Thousands of people agreed, and eventually the AP did it.

The new Tweet reads: “JD Vance says he laments that school shootings are a "fact of life" and says the U.S. needs to harden security to prevent more carnage like the shooting this week that left four dead in Georgia.”

And the new headline is: “JD Vance says he laments that school shootings are a ‘fact of life’ and calls for better security.”

The addition of “laments” shows that Vance isn’t dismissing the carnage. It’s an entirely fair way to write about it. The AP itself sort of acknowledged the error in a Tweet: “This post replaces an earlier post that was deleted to add context to the partial quote from Vance.”

But why did it take my intervention to force the AP to play fair? There’s no reason to badly misquote someone like that unless you’re a tabloid — or maybe if you’re just trying to help Vance’s opponents, the Democrats.

The Harris-Walz campaign quickly jumped on the original story, blasting out a press release and accusing the Ohio Senator of thinking that school shootings are just a “fact of life.”

The misleading story and quote are all over the place on the Internet. The top item on the Reddit page for pics is the misleading Vance quote, with at least 31,000 upvotes as of this writing.

All of this is corrosive not only for the reputation of the AP but for our democratic system itself.

As all this was happening, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution was reporting that some Georgia Republicans are interested in changes to gun laws. Some laws, like requiring the safe storage of guns to keep them away from children, could make a difference and aren’t wildly controversial.

But how are we ever going to get the parties to work together on these issues if the press is running such dishonest partisan stories? It shouldn’t take my Twitter intervention for to prevent this viral, partisan, and corrosive misinformation from getting out there.