The Washington Post has been all over the White House security breach story, and rightly so. That a man with a weapon was able to make it into the White House is a huge failure of security. But as the story evolves, the telling of the story has evolved as well.
When news broke that Omar Gonzalez didn’t just make it in the building, but ran through quite a bit of it before captured, the Post was all over it. But, in reading various accounts of the latest revelations, I noticed a change in the story. One word was removed.
The Post‘s original story read:
The female officer posted inside the front door appeared to be delayed in learning that the intruder, Omar Gonzalez, was about to burst through. Officers are trained that, upon learning of an intruder on the grounds, often through the alarm boxes posted around the property, they must immediately lock the front door.
Later in the night, in both the online and print edition, one word was omitted from that text:
The officer posted inside the front door appeared to be delayed in learning that the intruder, Omar Gonzalez, was about to burst through. Officers are trained that, upon learning of an intruder on the grounds — often through the alarm boxes posted around the property — they must immediately lock the front door.
Notice it? The word “female” is gone, down the memory hole and changed to just the androgynous “officer.”
Why make that change? The original was factually accurate, the new version is technically accurate. One offers some information, the other offers all the information.
Is political correctness altering the Washington Post‘s coverage of a major threat to the first family?