Politico mangled a quote from Rudy Giuliani’s Sunday interview on ABC’s This Week. Their headline was “Giuliani: Trump 'better for the United States than a woman'.” That misleading headline that leaves out half of Giuliani's sentence -- the half about Hillary's email scandal -- is also on top of the accompanying video, and in Politico tweets.
Rebecca Morin’s story offers the cheap take on Giuliani and then offered the whole sentence. But how many people in social media will never get to the fuller context? It went like this:
Donald Trump surrogate Rudy Giuliani on Sunday suggested that a man such as Donald Trump would be a better president "than a woman."
"Don’t you think a man who has this kind of economic genius is a lot better for the United States than a woman, and the only thing she’s ever produced is a lot of work for the FBI checking out her emails," the former New York City mayor said on ABC's This Week with George Stephanopoulos.
One might argue Giuliani realized in mid-sentence he had to make sure “woman” was modified by her flaws, like the e-mail scandal. But Politico making hay by shortening/mangling it is less defensible than doing a story in 2008 that accurately quoted Obama saying to Stephanopoulos “You’re absolutely right that John McCain has not talked about my Muslim faith.”
Can you imagine that tweet and headline coming from Politico? Obama: 'McCain has not talked about my Muslim faith'? But Politico ran helpful headlines like “ABC reporter: Obama 'constantly says' he's Christian.”
