The Free Press Deletes Video In Which Reporter Is Scared Of The Word “Habibi”

Olivia Reingold might be the most notably embarrassing employee at the Free Press, but her coworkers won't let her take that title without a fight. Last Wednesday, following the midterm elections, the outlet posted a video by a different staffer who characterized Abdul El-Sayed's victory speech, which he gave almost entirely in English, as being delivered in Arabic. By Sunday, that video was deleted. The publication announced the decision, which apparently needed four days of deliberation, with the following note:

We deleted an opinion video about the use of foreign languages in election night speeches. The post contained a factual error and its tone fell short of what we believe advances healthy public discourse. The rigorous editorial process that produces the work that appears on our website and in our newsletters must apply to everything we post on social media. We’ll be updating how we do things to achieve just that. We regret the error.

The video in question was by reporter Maya Sulkin, whose accompanying caption was as follows: “Senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed gave his victory speech in Arabic last night. Rep. Ilhan Omar addressed her victory party in Somali. And this morning, Iran’s supreme leader posted that America’s collapse ‘has accelerated.’ What should we make of these acceptance speeches?” The blue wave has resulted in some unlikely victories, but I didn't know that included the supreme leader of Iran.

In the video itself, Sulkin blankly stares while footage of El-Sayed's speech rolls in a little box below her, before she says, “OK, so that is the first Muslim senator in American history, giving his victory speech in Detroit in Arabic." But he merely stated his full name, along with a couple of common Arabic words, in a speech largely delivered in English. To build her case, Sulkin also noted that El-Sayed jokingly called Vice President J.D. Vance "habibi." Concerning. The Free Press video has since been scrubbed from the internet, but here's the first part of it:

Two days later, the Free Press offered a Friday afternoon correction that would seem to invalidate the point of the whole video:

CORRECTION: This post and opinion video states that Abdul El-Sayed gave his acceptance speech in Arabic. That’s not accurate. In fact, he said a few phrases in Arabic, but the majority of his speech was in English. The Free Press regrets the error.

Well, what more could you ask from the site that launched with the promise of offering an alternative to the intellectual laziness and bias that has recently bedeviled the mainstream media? It's so hard to figure out why they may have scripted, produced, edited, and released such a willful mischaracterization of a politician about whom they've spent a lot of time fear-mongering, with Bari Weiss even using the CBS News name to try to associate him with 9/11. But everyone makes honest mistakes.

Besides, the Free Press video department has done so much great work otherwise. Where else could you see Olivia Reingold, sitting near a tree and talking about Rama Duwaji's Spotify account? Or Olivia Reingold, walking around a town in Vermont as she tries to find a Jewish person? Or Olivia Reingold, recounting the riveting tale of how Democratic failure Haley Stevens asked her to come over? If you love seeing phone videos of Reingold's face, or are curious about whether or not she's wearing some weird glasses, it's an indispensable resource.

With this new vow by the Free Press to apply the same level of rigor to its videos as it does to its website, we can all rest easy. And if the masthead worries that the public discourse around this video has become starved of good faith, perhaps that's only because it was already unhealthy.