Newsweek Demotes Editor After Firing Reporter for Inaccurate Trump Thanksgiving Story

A second employee has been penalized for a story suggesting the president spent Thanksgiving tweeting and playing golf

President Donald Trump Departs White House For Walter Reed National Military Medical Center
Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

A Newsweek editor has been demoted following the publication of a story published on Thursday that initially said President Trump could spend Thanksgiving tweeting and playing golf, when he actually spent it in Afghanistan.

“The editor was demoted,” a spokesperson for Newsweek told TheWrap on Monday morning.

The demotion follows the firing of political reporter Jessica Kwong on Friday, after the Thanksgiving piece was mocked on Twitter by the president and his son, Donald Trump Jr.

“I thought Newsweek was out of business?” Trump asked.

The president actually spent his Thanksgiving on the unannounced trip to visit American troops, though the Newsweek piece, published in Thursday morning, suggested he would “probably be tweeting, or expressing his opinions in another way.”

Kwong did not respond to TheWrap’s request for comment on her firing or the demotion of the editor, but told the Washington Examiner over the weekend that the story was assigned to her in advance of the surprise trip and she reached out to the editor on duty on Thanksgiving to relay news of the trip. According to what Kwong told the Examiner, that editor chose to assign the story of the trip to a different reporter and didn’t update Kwong’s piece “in a timely manner.”

The new headline and subsequent updates to the article came hours later.

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