Guest Post by Kristinn Taylor
MSNBC brought upon itself a tsunami-sized response from conservatives Wednesday evening for a Tweet promoting an article at MSNBC.com about the new Cheerios ad set to debut during this weekend’s Super Bowl broadcast.
The MSNBC tweet said, “Maybe the rightwing will hate it, but everyone else will go awww: the adorable new #Cheerios ad w/ biracial family.”
The brief article, credited to Gabriela Resto-Montero, that was being promoted on Twitter began with “The Cheerios family is back.
“The breakfast cereal’s new Super Bowl ad features the same fictional biracial family that sparked a conservative backlash last year.”
The phrase “sparked a conservative backlash” contained a link to an MSNBC article from last year that mentioned the controversy over the ad, but the article did not report a political bent to the racist comments made about the ad. That article in turn links back to another MSNBC article about the ad controversy that also does not ascribe political motives to the racist attacks.
In other words, Gabriela Resto-Montero and MSNBC made up the alleged ‘conservative’,’ right wing’ racist attack on the Cheerios ad.
After Michelle Malkin went after MSNBC on Twitter, MSNBC.com Executive Editor Richard Wolffe posted a personal apology on Twitter. Wolffe did not apologize for the article that prompted the tweet nor did he mention the edit.
The article was edited so that the word conservative was taken out. The article now reads “…sparked a backlash last year.”
The edit is not mentioned, but the article time stamp notes an update at 9:14 p.m. EST.
At 10:55 p.m. EST MSNBC apologized on Twitter for the tweet smearing conservatives as racists. MSNBC then announced it would be deleting the offending tweet.
Earlier, this account tweeted an offensive line about the new Cheerios ad. We deeply regret it. It does not reflect the position of msnbc.
— msnbc (@msnbc) January 30, 2014
The original language of the MSNBC article was reported at Free Republic at 9:11 p.m. EST, shortly before the article was “updated”.
UPDATE: MSNBC made a second edit in the article that deleted another slur against conservatives.
UPDATE: NewsBusters picked this up.
