As it is owned by the combative and politically right-leaning media baron Rupert Murdoch, it would not be unusual for the New York Post to publish headlines exalting Republican politicians while besmirching their Democratic rivals and immigrants.
But the headlines which the newspaper’s website and Twitter account published on Thursday morning went too far even for a Murdoch entity, and ultimately the Post’s brass announced the offensive material was all the work of a rogue employee who commandeered the company’s various digital properties.
Readers across the US woke up to fake Post website articles discussing how the New York Republican gubernatorial challenger Lee Zeldin had pledged to force himself on the Democratic incumbent, Kathy Hochul – as well as how Texas’s far-right governor, Greg Abbott, had ordered border patrol agents to execute undocumented immigrants.
Meanwhile, the Post’s Twitter feed boosted a fabricated report purporting to quote Zeldin as he made racist comments about New York City’s Black mayor, Eric Adams, as well as fake editorial columns calling for the assassinations of the progressive Bronx-raised congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Joe Biden and the president’s son, Hunter Biden.
The Post’s administrators regained control of their website and Twitter account relatively quickly and took down the inflammatory screeds, which were posted by someone identifying themselves as “Thrax”, a handle used in similar prior cases. The Post later issued statements blaming the mess on “unauthorized conduct” by an employee who had been fired.
The statements did not name the dismissed employee.
An initial statement from the outlet had only said: “The New York Post has been hacked. We are currently investigating the cause.”
Readers nationwide, along with some of those who had been picked on by the removed articles, panned the Post after its explanations about what had happened.
A number of social media users wryly professed that they didn’t even suspect the Post might have been hacked when the articles in question first surfaced.
In response to a Twitter collage of Thursday’s fake headlines, the Huffington Post’s senior front page editor, Philip Lewis, wrote: “[Not going to lie,] this looks like NY Post normally so I kept on scrolling.”
The executive editor of the progressive political organization Occupy Democrats, Grant Stern, similarly commented: “Hacked NY Post: most readers couldn’t tell the difference.”
A spokesperson for Hochul’s re-election campaign, Jen Goodman, issued a statement immediately demanding that the Post elaborate on “how this reprehensible content was made public”. It also accused the Murdoch-run newspaper of having “long fostered an ugly, toxic conversation on their front pages and social accounts, but these posts are more disgusting and vile than usual”.
Meanwhile, a spokesperson for Adams, Fabien Levy, condemned the tone of the removed material on Twitter.
“These vile, racist and sexist comments have no place in public discourse, even by those unlawfully hacking a Twitter account,” Levy said.
Murdoch’s News Corp, which owns the Wall Street Journal as well as the UK newspapers the Times and the Sun – has owned the Post since 1993, and industry analysts say it enjoys one of the largest readerships in the US.
The 91-year-old Australian billionaire also owns Fox, which broadcasts the Republican-friendly Fox News, among other things.
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