During the presidential campaign, when HuffPost wanted to make a powerful statement about Donald Trump, it tacked a forceful but rather long-winded editor’s note onto political reports:
Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims — 1.6 billion members of an entire religion — from entering the U.S.
On Friday, after Trump fired White House chief strategist Stephen K. Bannon, HuffPost went with something a lot more pithy — and at least as provocative: a homepage splash that read, “GOY, BYE!”
“HuffPost splash headlines have always been edgy and playful, featuring puns and references to popular culture,” a spokeswoman told me in an email. “Today’s splash was intended to be a mash-up tribute to Yiddish and Beyoncé. Any other interpretation was completely unintended.”
The site’s editor in chief, Lydia Polgreen, tweeted the same thing. So did Chloe Angyal, HuffPost’s senior front page editor, who authored the headline.
“Boy, bye!” is, of course, an iconic line from the Beyoncé song “Sorry.” And “goy” is a Yiddish term for a non-Jew.
Things are not quite so simple, however. “Goy” has been co-opted by white supremacists as a way to describe themselves. White supremacists hate Jews and therefore stole a Jewish word to proclaim their non-Jewishness.
When President Trump visited the Western Wall in Jerusalem in May, former Ku Klux Klan grand wizard David Duke captioned a photo of Trump: “The Rise Of The Good Goy.”
‘The Rise Of The Good Goy’
Rated: SAD pic.twitter.com/Vs1ND2lhD1
— David Duke (@DrDavidDuke) May 22, 2017
By labeling Bannon a “goy” on Friday, HuffPost lumped in the former Breitbart News chairman with white supremacists.
Polgreen figured that the headline would be controversial and tweeted that she welcomed the attention.
Looking forward to it!
— Lydia Polgreen (@lpolgreen) August 18, 2017
Polgreen told me in May that she considers “the working person’s tabloid” to be “the best and most egalitarian tradition in journalism.”
At the time, HuffPost had just hired Jim Rich, the former editor in chief of the New York Daily News — known for striking Trump headlines — to be the site’s executive editor.
I asked Polgreen whether HuffPost would mimic any characteristics of conservative sites such as the Drudge Report and, yes, Breitbart, and this is what she said:
The kind of vortex of Internet journalism that inspired HuffPost was the Drudge Report, and I continue to see that as a source of inspiration. Matt Drudge is a master curator; he’s a master packager. I think, to this day, HuffPost gets a lot of its DNA and mojo from the best lessons that Drudge has learned in his many, many years of doing his thing.
I think that Breitbart has been very good at packaging and framing stories in a way that is designed to invoke outrage and, I think, some would say HuffPost also packages and puts together stories in ways to invoke outrage. It’s really a question of what the target of that outrage is, who you’re representing and who should be outraged. I don’t want to speak for Breitbart, but I have a very clear sense of who should be outraged in our audience, and that’s ordinary people who are wondering what the big powerful institutions that govern their lives are up to. That’s where we aim our outrage machine.
Bold as HuffPost’s initial Bannon headline was, the site did change it later in the day.
