Sunday, October 05, 2014



Must hide female incompetence

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?

SOURCE



8 comments:

Anonymous said...

No doubt some would consider it sexist to blame a female agent for the lapse.

Anonymous said...

The lack of seriousness is unbelievable. I don't give a flying Wallenda what the sex or any other PC criteria the agent is. I want that agent to take out whoever comes thru that door. And, why in God's name is there no perimeter alert system in place? Anyone in their right mind would accept 99 false positives to prevent the one that got in and blew up the WH.

slinky said...

She probably has trouble parking her car too.

Anonymous said...

What's with the head of the secret service? She hardly looks like someone with experience on the field. One incompetent book after another have been appointed by our fearless leader.

Anonymous said...

What's with the head of the secret service? She hardly looks like someone with experience on the field. One incompetent boob after another have been appointed by our fearless leader.

Anonymous said...

The WH doesn't recruit on competence but on party loyalty which is why no one is ever held accountable and sacked.

Anthony Billings Art said...

As a former journalist, I don't see any need for the word anyway. Describing the officer as female is no more pertinent than telling us her favorite color. Her gender just doesn't matter unless you ARE trying to correlate it with her failure to act. If I were editing the original post, I would have deleted it just to reduce word-count, not to protect anyone's feelings. Political correctness be damned, the fewer the words needed to get the story across the better.

Anonymous said...

We should have been told if she was a lesbian!