USA Today Changes Trump Abortion Headline After Biden Campaign Torpedoes Them In Press Call — See Deleted Version
USA Today changed its headline about former President Donald Trump’s abortion message after President Joe Biden’s campaign torpedoed the paper in a press call.
Sometimes, working the ref works — or so it seems. Trump posted a four-and-a-half-minute Truth Social video Monday morning with his long-promised “statement about abortion” — which appeared to many to be a snubbing of a national abortion ban.
But the Biden campaign disagreed strongly with this sort of coverage. They held a press conference call on Monday with Campaign Manager Julie Chavez Rodriguez, Deputy Communications Director Brooke Goren, and Kaitlyn Kash in response to Trump’s announcement.
In her opening remarks, Goren hit the media, reading off offending headlines and quotes from The Associated Press, The Washington Post, CNN — and one “particularly egregiously false” headline that was from USA Today:
Trump is proudly responsible for the nightmare women like Kaitlyn Kash are living through. Trump kept his word to overturn Roe in his last term, and he will not rest until he has banned abortion across the entire country. Period.
We all know this and the coverage needs to reflect it. Yet today, we’re still reading headlines that say Trump, quote, “declines to endorse a national abortion ban,” that Trump, quote, “rebuffed pressure to the campaign on a national limit,” that Trump, quote, “decided to punt the politically fraught issue to the states and not back a national abortion ban.”
One particularly egregiously false headline even said Trump, quote, “opposes a national abortion ban and will leave it up to the will of the people.”
That headline — “‘The will of the people’: Trump opposes national abortion ban; says states should decide” — is from a USA Today article that has since been changed.
About seven hours after it was published, and around two hours after the conference call, the old headline was deleted and replaced with one that reads “Donald Trump says states should decide abortion policy, avoids talk of a national ban” — without noting the change with an editor’s note.
Watch above via Biden-Harris 2024.
