The ridiculous coverage of Mike Pence’s picture

Before his early exit on Sunday, Vice President Mike Pence tweeted a picture of himself and his wife at an Indianapolis Colts game in 2014 captioned: “Looking forward to cheering for our @Colts & honoring the great career of #18 Peyton Manning at @LucasOilStadium today. Go Colts!”

Social media sleuths who noticed the picture was from 2014 seemed to believe they caught the vice president attempting to pass it off as a picture from Sunday’s game. I can’t believe this tweet actually needs parsing, but it was posted a half hour before kickoff and Pence clearly said he was “looking forward” to the game. Pairing such sentiments with a photo from an earlier game is not a noteworthy decision, and that the picture was from Sunday’s game was not implicit at all. He said he was looking forward to it, not “here is a picture of me at the game,” which had yet to even begin.

Nevertheless, news outlets ran entire articles based on the photo being a repost, suggesting that Pence had been busted in a sloppy attemp to mislead people. In fact, by making a story out of the picture at all, it was the media coverage that mislead readers into believing it contradicted anything in his tweet.

Pence gave people plenty of things to talk about yesterday. This was not one of them.

Emily Jashinsky is a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner.