Yahoo Movies UK on Wednesday updated the headline and text of a story about Chris Pratt after backlash over online claims that the “Avengers: Endgame” star wore a “white supremacist” t-shirt.
“This article was updated on 17 July with the initial headline, ‘Chris Pratt criticised for ‘white supremacist’ T-shirt’ being amended to ‘Chris Pratt criticised for T-shirt choice.’ References to White Supremacism in this article have been removed,” an update on the story reads.
The British division of the news site came under fire for the Tuesday article about Pratt’s decision to wear a shirt featuring a Gadsden flag, or an American flag accompanied by a rattlesnake and the words, “Don’t tread on me.”
As Fox News noted, that design “was meant to symbolize liberty and freedom,” but “has been revived by the Tea Party” in recent years.
— hunter harris (@hunteryharris) July 15, 2019
The original Yahoo article embedded a handful of tweets from mostly anonymous users to suggest that people were angry over the actor’s t-shirt design. But soon the platform itself came under fire from prominent journalists and columnists.
Washington Post senior political reporter Aaron Blake wrote, “The media took a bold, largely unprecedented step this week to call Trump’s tweets ‘racist.’ Then Yahoo News did its best to undermine the whole exercise.”
L.A. Times columnist Jonah Goldberg weighed in: “Shame on @Yahoo for this trash. A handful of dumb twitter comments isn’t a news story you click-baiting parasites. There [sic] nothing white supremacist about that T-shirt. It’s like everyone wants to be stupid and make everything worse.”
Reps for Yahoo’s parent company, Oath, have not responded to requests for comment.