Gannett issued an apology Tuesday for neglecting to affix an editor’s note to a retroactively edited USA Today op-ed authored by failed gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams.
“We regret the oversight in updating the Stacey Abrams column,” said a spokesperson for Gannett, which owns roughly 100 newspapers, including USA Today. “As soon as we recognized there was no editor’s note, we added it to the page to reflect her changes. We have reviewed our procedures to ensure this does not occur again.”
Too late. Too many people read the original piece, in which Abrams voiced support for a boycott of Georgia over its new voting laws.
The USA Today article, which was published on March 31, days before Major League Baseball made the choice to withdraw from Georgia over the passage of voting laws Abrams opposes, argued originally that boycotts would be justified under the current circumstances. When Georgia and its businesses lost the All-Star Game, all over hyped-up partisan concerns behind a thin guise of concern about voter access, USA Today inexplicably did Abrams a favor to spare her the backlash.
Fact-checkers have already been misled. Some cited the quietly amended opinion article as “proof” Abrams didn’t encourage businesses to boycott Georgia. A PolitiFact fact check even quoted the article’s new anti-boycott language, presenting it as if it was something the Georgia Democrat said before the MLB announced on April 2 it would relocate the All-Star Game to Colorado.
But there’s a significant difference between what the article says now and what it said when it was first published.
“The impassioned response to the racist, classist bill that is now the law of Georgia is to boycott in order to achieve change,” the original version of her op-ed stated. “Events hosted by major league baseball, world class soccer, college sports and dozens of Hollywood films hang in the balance.”
She added, “At the same time, activists urge Georgians to swear off of hometown products to express our outrage. Until we hear clear, unequivocal statements that show Georgia-based companies get what’s at stake, I can’t argue with an individual’s choice to opt for their competition.”
There’s more.
“However,” Abrams said, “one lesson of boycotts is that the pain of deprivation must be shared to be sustainable. Otherwise, those least resilient bear the brunt of these actions; and in the aftermath, they struggle to access the victory.”
She continued, saying, “And boycotts are complicated affairs that require a long-term commitment to action. I have no doubt that voters of color, particularly Black voters, are willing to endure the hardships of boycotts. But I don’t think that’s necessary — yet. … I ask you to bring your business to Georgia and, if you’re already here, stay and fight. Stay and vote.”
The article appears to have undergone significant edits on April 6, after businesses began protesting Georgia in line with Democrats’ priorities. Much of the op-ed’s original language has been amended to soften the parts in which Abrams argued boycotts of the state would be justified.
The article now reads:
Rather than accept responsibility for their craven actions, Republican leaders blame me and others who have championed voting rights (and actually read the bill). Their faux outrage is designed to hide the fact that they prioritized making it harder for people of color to vote over the economic well-being of all Georgians. To add to the injury, the failed former president is now calling for cancellation of baseball as the national pastime.
Boycotts invariably also cost jobs. To be sustainable, the pain of deprivation must be shared rather than borne by those who are least resilient. They also require a long-term commitment to action. The North Carolina boycott of 2016 didn’t stop with the election of Democrat Roy Cooper, and the venerable Montgomery Bus Boycott lasted 381 days, ending only with a Supreme Court decision.
The revised op-ed adds, “Instead of a boycott, I strongly urge other events and productions to do business in Georgia and speak out against our law and similar proposals in other states.”
The article’s opening line was initially two words: “Boycotts work.” It now reads, “Boycotts work — when the target risks losing something highly valued and the pain becomes unbearable. “
Now, fast-forward to when Republican Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas said on social media, “Stacey Abrams described Georgia’s new voting law as ‘Jim Crow’ at least 10 times before MLB moved the All-Star game. She also wrote ‘boycotts work’ and threatened the businesses which didn’t attack the new law. She convinced the MLB to boycott Georgia.”
Fact-checkers were quick to fight on Abrams’s behalf, and some (hopefully unwittingly) used USA Today’s stealth edits to defend her.
PolitiFact, for example, reported Abrams said in a March 31 op-ed that “boycotts invariably also cost jobs. To be sustainable, the pain of deprivation must be shared rather than borne by those who are least resilient. They also require a long-term commitment to action.”
However, as you can see in the above, that is not what Abrams wrote before the MLB and others took action against Georgia. That language was put in afterward to spare her the embarrassment of having helped cost her state so much business.
PolitiFact has since amended its story to reflect the Abrams article underwent significant changes. But it doesn’t really matter. The narrative is set in stone. This is the news update Twitter provided to its millions of users this week: “Stacey Abrams encouraged Americans to invest in Georgia-based businesses after new voter laws were passed, according to journalists and fact-checkers.”
It’s canon now, even though it is untrue. Abrams was always anti-boycott, even when she was running around calling the new voting laws “Jim Crow” and writing op-eds with opening lines that were simply “boycotts work.”
We were always at war with Eastasia.
