The Funniest Tweets About The Washington Post‘s Terrible Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi Headline

By Scott Russell  |  October 28, 2019 | 12:16pm
Photos by Alex Wong/Getty
Politics Lists Washington Post
The Funniest Tweets About The Washington Post‘s Terrible Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi Headline

These are hard times to be in media, but that’s no excuse to be a bonehead. The Washington Post made a truly unfortunate choice in covering the death of ISIS leader and despicable terrorist Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi on Sunday, initially referring to this objectively terrible person as an “austere religious scholar” in their obituary’s headline before later replacing that cringeworthy descriptor with “extremist leader of Islamic State.” A WaPo staffer later acknowledged in a tweet, “Regarding our al-Baghdadi obituary, the headline should never have read that way and we changed it quickly,” but the damage was already done. The internet is forever, and the internet is fast, as demonstrated by the numerous Twitter users who captured WaPo’s gaffe and flipped it into fodder for comedy, using the hashtag #WaPoDeathNotices to mock the paper’s euphemistic phrasing by applying it to notorious villains from history and pop culture alike. Check out a selection of the funniest tweets below.

 
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