The Washington Post expressed regret Sunday after running a headline that described ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi as a “religious scholar.”
The White House announced Sunday that al-Baghdadi killed himself by detonating a suicide vest as U.S. forces raided his Syrian compound.
The Post originally described him in a headline as the “Islamic State’s ‘terrorist-in-chief,'” but the headline was changed after publication to “Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, austere religious scholar at helm of Islamic State, dies at 48.”
The Post’s headline was quietly changed to refer to al-Baghdadi as the “extremist leader of Islamic State.” A newspaper spokeswoman soon apologized for the headline. “Regarding our al-Baghdadi obituary, the headline should never have read that way and we changed it quickly,” the Post‘s vice president for communications Kris Coratti said in a tweet.
Coratti later attempted to blame the breaking nature of the news for the decision to change the headline from the original “terrorist-in-chief” framing. She told CNN that “Post correspondents have spent years in Iraq and Syria documenting ISIS savagery, often at great personal risk. Unfortunately, a headline written in haste to portray the origins of al-Baghdadi and ISIS didn’t communicate that brutality. The headline was promptly changed.” – READ MORE