New York Post Denies it Ordered Reporter to ‘Deliberately Publish Factually Inaccurate Information’

New York Post

The New York Post issued a very specifically worded statement after one of its reporters quit in dramatic fashion this week, claiming she had been “ordered” the false story on books by Vice President Kamala Harris being handed out to migrant children.

In a statement to to Mediaite, The Post was terse:

The New York Post does not order reporters to deliberately publish factually inaccurate information. In this case, the story was amended as soon as it came to the editors’ attention that it was inaccurate.

That statement comes in response to Laura Italiano, a former Post reporter who announced her resignation this week after her viral story on the Harris books turned out to be false.

“An announcement: Today I handed in my resignation to my editors at the New York Post,” she wrote. “The Kamala Harris story — an incorrect story I was ordered to write and which I failed to push back hard enough against — was my breaking point.”

The report falsely claimed that copies of a children’s book by the vice president were being given to migrant children at a shelter in Long Beach, California as part of “welcome kits.”

The story was on the front page of the Post, and was covered extensively across conservative media, including on Fox News.

On Tuesday The Post deleted the story from the internet. That came after a Washington Post fact-check found that just one of Harris’s books was donated to the shelter, by a local, as part of a book drive. A heavily revised version of the story was reposted later on Tuesday, along with an editor’s note.

This story has been updated.