Elon Musk joins chorus of critics dumping on the Associated Press over its trifecta of laughably bad hot takes

The Associated Press appears to have had a rough Wednesday on account of unforced errors committed by the ideologues in its midst.

In three glaring instances, reporters at the New York City-based media agency managed to get their inaccurate and partisan hot takes cleared by editors, then published. While the AP has never been immune to leftist bias and inaccuracy — having all but brought the world to the brink with an erroneous November 2022 report that Russia had launched a missile strike on a NATO nation — the agency's rapid sequence of bad hot takes this week prompted an especially scathing response from critics.

South African billionaire Elon Musk, among the AP's many critics, responded to one of the instances of buffoonery, writing on X, "The @AP has the woke mind virus growing out of its head like a giant mushroom!"

The AP is evidently cognizant of its embarrassing errors, granted it has been desperately attempting to correct them. However, this corrective effort has been made all the more difficult by the fact that myriad publications across the nation routinely regurgitate the AP's articles — meaning those errors continue to live on coast to coast despite the agency's centralized efforts to make stealth edits and title changes.

Leftist plagiarism: A 'conservative weapon'

Blaze News previously detailed the criticism the AP was met with Wednesday over its coverage of Claudine Gay's resignation as president of Harvard and exacted an explanation from the agency.

While Gay's resignation ostensibly highlighted that there remained some consequences in academia for scholarly misconduct, the AP instead ran an article entitled, "Harvard president's resignation highlights new conservative weapon against colleges: plagiarism."

Critics wondered how Gay's deficit of integrity and alleged tendency to pass off the work of others as her own in at least seven of her published works amounted to a "conservative weapon." Others contemplated why a university president's self-destructive behavior needed be framed in partisan terms.

The AP's corresponding post on X was flagged with Community Notes emphasizing the absurdity of the title and the article's premise.

Later in the day, the AP changed the title to "Plagiarism charges downed Harvard's president. A conservative attack helped to fan the outrage." This altered version was executed without an editorial note.

The AP ultimately told Blaze News why it had made the change: "The initial story didn't meet our standards, so we updated it."

Scalping, according to the AP

Deep in the Gay article, the AP's Collin Binkley and Moriah Balingit highlighted a tweet from New College of Florida board member and Hillsdale College fellow Christopher Rufo wherein he wrote, "SCALPED," in response to the news that Gay had resigned.

The AP claimed that Rufo had done so "as if Gay was a trophy of violence, invoking a gruesome practice taken up by white colonists who sought to eradicate Native Americans."

Just as with its suggestion that a leftist university leader's questionable practices were the fault of conservatives, the article's racially charged and ahistorical statement about scalping prompted backlash.

Again Musk opined, writing, "Woe, the @AP hasn't merely drunk the woke Kool-Aid, they are swimming in it!"

The tech billionaire added, "Somehow, indigenous peoples went from being referred to almost exclusively as baby-killing savages to almost exclusively being referred to as noble, peace-loving ecologists! In reality, all peoples back then did terrible things by modern western standards. Slavery, for example, was standard practice worldwide, including within Africa, until a few hundred years ago and was stamped out by force primarily by the British."

Others highlighted that several past tweets from one of the article's authors, Balingit, hinted at a deep-seated antipathy for white people.

Gov. Ron DeSantis' press secretary Jeremy Redfern pressed Balingit and Binkley for a response after sharing an image of a white man who had been scalped as a boy by Sioux Indians.

According to Britannica, archeological evidence, specifically from a mass grave in South Dakota, suggests North American Indians were scalping one another since at least the early 14th century, long before "white colonists" had made it to North America.

"Native Americans in the Southeast took scalps to achieve the status of warrior and to placate the spirits of the dead, while most members of Northeastern tribes valued the taking of captives over scalps," Britannica indicated. "Among Plains Indians scalps were taken for war honours, often from live victims. As a challenge to their enemies, some Native Americans shaved their heads."

After being overwhelmingly confronted with the inaccuracy of their framing and suggestion, the AP caved and edited the paragraph without providing an editorial note.

The paragraph now reads: "On X, formerly Twitter, he wrote 'SCALPED,' as if Gay was a trophy of violence, invoking a gruesome practice taken up by white colonists who sought to eradicate Native Americans and also used by some tribes against their enemies."

The 'not-racist state flag'

The Associated Press wasn't a punchline Wednesday only on account of its revisionist history and title claim about the weaponization of Gay's apparent use of copy and paste. The agency also published an article entitled "Things to know about Minnesota's new, non-racist state flag and seal," concerning the Minnesota Emblems Redesign Commission's final decision on a new state flag.

Whereas the old flag, which the AP apparently concluded was necessarily racist, depicts an Indian riding a horse and a farmer plowing his field, the new flag by 24-year-old white designer Andrew Prekker is a minimalist, starred tricolor bearing some resemblance to the colors flown by a Somali state.

Facing additional lampoonery over its suggestion that the old state flag was racist and the new flag wasn't, the AP, apparently not committed to its characterization, changed the title to "Things to know about Minnesota's new state flag and seal."

Despite the change, the AP's Steve Karnowski's heartfelt opinions remain baked into the piece.

"The flag does not resemble that of Somalia nor of its Puntland region," wrote Karnowski, sensitive to the criticism over Andrew Prekker's design, which had become the basis for the final flag.

Some conservative commentators had suggested Prekker's approved design was reminiscent of the Jubaland flag, right down to the colors. However, the flag — like the AP write up — has been altered such that it no longer has the white and green bars.

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