USA Today The paper reportedly secretly removed an op-ed by a U.S. senator who opposed transgender athletes, without notifying readers or the senator who wrote the article.
The op-ed, written by outspoken Republican Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana, was published this month. It was titled: Is trans inclusion more important than women’s sports? Extracts are still available on the Senate website.
But now, when I click on the link to the previous article, USA Today The network newspaper posted an error notice saying: “Content has been removed: does not meet editorial standards,” adding: “This content has been removed because it does not meet our editorial standards.”
Perhaps that means the senator’s article did not succumb to the radical left’s transgender agenda.
Republican Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana speaks to reporters as he leaves the Senate Republican Policy Luncheon at the Hart Senator’s Office Building in Washington, DC, USA, Wednesday, September 23, 2020. (Stephanie Reynolds/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Senator Kennedy slammed the Gannett-owned news networks, Said “USA TODAY Network apparently doesn’t like the way I phrased it,” Fox News reported.
“They think they are the speech police. Intoxicated by their certainty and virtue, they think they are our moral teachers. This attitude is why many Americans have lost trust in the media, and trust will never be restored until the media returns to neutrality instead of advocacy,” Kennedy continued.
“Most people do not support allowing biological males to participate in girls’ sports because they believe it will corrupt sports, skew the results and hurt women. Some people are against it,” he continued. “Gannett should only report both sides and not try to silence those who disagree.”
In a now-deleted post, Kennedy made a series of claims and provided links to evidence.
“Some activists claim that transgender athletes are different from typical men because they take cross-sex hormones. But after two years of cross-sex hormone treatment, biologically male athletes Still possible “Men can run 12 percent faster and do 10 percent more push-ups than women,” he writes.
Elsewhere, it states, “Allowing biological boys to compete as girls would have a negative impact on girls’ sport. Yet many activists believe their feelings and those of transgender athletes are more important.”
“Men and women don’t compete for the same reasons, but transgender activists want sports institutions to ignore these obvious physical differences so that transgender athletes feel accepted, even if it means harming biological girls,” the senator said.
Demonstrators listen to a program of speakers during the “Our Bodies, Our Sports” rally marking the 50th anniversary of Title IX at Freedom Plaza in Washington, DC on June 23, 2022. (Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images)
Kennedy had not received any communication from Gannett that his op-ed was inappropriate, but by May 14 he began noticing that links to his articles on the Senate website no longer displayed the articles.
Kennedy told Fox News that the paper’s editor-in-chief, Misty Castile, Shreveport TimesThe New York Times, one of the first newspapers to publish the article, said it had retracted the op-ed because it lacked “citations” to back up Senator Kennedy’s claims, but after it was pointed out that he had added links to back up his claims, he retracted them.
In other emails to the senator’s office, Casteel argued that Kennedy used “suggestive language” by deliberately using the terms “biological male” and “biological female” and asked that the article be rewritten to include the suggestive term rather than the facts.
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