The hierarchy of bad posts

was gonna wait until next week to slither back on into yr inboxes, but it’s day 3 of the new year and i feel a l i v e :

So look, it’s not exactly rocket science to fault our industry peers for having a tiny bit of holiday brain over the past couple of weeks — honestly, at least it means that we all made it to the end of the year at a time when things were looking P R E T T Y dicey for a bit — but I do feel like we should differentiate the orders of magnitude between a few standout dust-ups that have popped up on Twitter: 

Like listen, sometimes you’re tired and overworked and you happen to not hit up the Goog because idk, buying an assassinated president’s shirt DOES seem in line with what the bizarrely rich do these days, so you write it up and get a quick lesson in the gentle art of fact checking. Fine! No one got hurt, and honestly everyone who isn’t Kim K thought it was all very funny. 

But then there’s, ugh, whatever’s been going on with the NYT Opinion pages lately but MADE A LOT WORSE via you-know-which-columnist linking out to race science in 2019. Which, okay, most of us did not have on my bingo board... but we probably should have!! ‘Cause hey i mean sometimes you just slip and fall down and slightly overlook sources that may or may not have been co-authored by eugenicists; it happens; they teach you this on day 2 of j-school (along with Don’t Confuse A Provocative Opinion With Rusting Trash) but it’s during syllabus week so what are ya gonna do?? Much like sea level rise, some things simply can’t be helped! 

But then, okay, there is the clear and obvious choice of Being An Unequivocal Dick About It, and that’s why this NY Post piece about a homeless man just being like, ugh, just SO homeless takes the cake for egregious acts of journalism in our book. It is rare to hold up a post to the light and not see at least a faint watermark of good intention come through, but yep, nope, you could put this shit in an MRI and nothing would come up. Pro tip: if the content tags at the end of the story look like this...

…..it is officially time to check yourself. Do we need to set up a hotline or can you handle yourselves??