Louisiana Republican Senator John Kennedy was shocked to discover that newspaper chain/media company USA Today quietly eliminated his op-ed in which he criticized transgender athletes.
Not only did the Gannett-owned paper chain delete Kennedy’s op-ed, they didn’t even tell him they were deleting the article that had already been published by several of the chain’s participating papers days before.
The article, published in eight of the Gannett papers, was entitled, “Is transgender inclusion more important than women’s sports?” and excerpts of his piece are still available on the Louisianan’s senate website.
But while the article is still featured on his senate website, the full article was removed from all the papers. Now, when you click to the link where the article used to appear, readers see a notice that reads, “Content removed: did not meet editorial standards,” and continues saying, “This content has been removed because it did not meet our editorial standards.”
The senator has since told Fox News that his article was removed because he didn’t bend his knee to the woke terminology that the paper wanted him to use when speaking about radical transgenderism.
Kennedy slammed the USA Today, telling Fox News, that the “USA TODAY Network apparently does not like the way I express myself.”
“They think they are the speech police. Drunk on certainty and virtue, they think they are our moral teacher. This attitude is why so many Americans have lost confidence in the media. The media is not going to win that trust back until they return to neutrality instead of advocacy,” Kennedy claimed.
According to his website, he made a series of claims in his article denouncing transgender athletes, each backed up with a link to the source he used to reach his conclusions.
“Some activists claim that transgender athletes are different from typical men because they take cross-sex hormones. After two years of cross-sex hormone treatments, however, biological male athletes can still run 12% faster and pound out 10% more push-ups than women,” Kennedy wrote.
Should this op-ed be republished?
Sen. Kennedy also said, “Allowing biological boys to compete as girls will harm women’s sports. Still, many activists believe their feelings and the feelings of transgender athletes are more important.”
“Men and women don’t compete for the same reasons. Yet transgender activists want athletic institutions to ignore these obvious physical differences so transgender athletes can feel included, even if it hurts biological girls in the process,” the sen. also said.
After the paper published the op-ed early in May, Kennedy said he noticed by May 14 that the links he supplied to the articles on his senate website no longer worked.
Kennedy told Fox News that he reached out to one of the USA Today affiliated papers that originally published the article and had an email exchange with Misty Castile, the executive editor for the Shreveport Times.
At first, Castile claimed that they deleted Kennedy’s article because of a lack of “citations” to support his claims. But in a follow-up email, she backtracked on that claim after Kennedy pointed out that there were half a dozen links to citations to support his claims.
In other emails, Castile accused Kennedy of using “loaded language” because he wrote “biological male” and “biological female.”
Castile further demanded that he rewrite the article to use the left’s woke terminology and then she would “consider” republishing the article.
Kennedy blasted the paper chain, saying, “Most people don’t support allowing biological men to participate in women’s sports because they think that will bastardize sports, skew the results, and hurt women. Other people disagree. Gannett should simply report the two sides and not try to silence the position it disagrees with.”
