The Gold Medal in Fake News

While perusing the front page of the Washington Post this morning I saw a graphic showing the standings in terms of gold medals won at the 2018 PyeongChang Winter Olympics in South Korea.

Congratulations are in order for the athletes from Norway who are leading the pack both in number of gold medals and total medals won, but the first thing that popped out at me was the odd way that WaPo chose to showcase the rankings in their teaser graphic. Instead of going in numerical order, as any rational person might have done, they chose to skip the fourth place country (The Netherlands) and showcase the United States who comes in at fifth place.

But not only did WaPo skip the fourth place Netherlands, they also omitted the fact that the United States is tied for fifth place in terms of gold medals won with France, who is also beating the U.S. in terms of total medals won. When you click through for their full medal count you get this:

Obviously this situation is more stupid than it is important, but it does seem odd that an organization who says it's going to protect our democracy from dying in darkness would engage in such a feeble untruth. It's disrespectful to the athletes from the Netherlands and France who have obviously so far managed to outcompete the American athletes, and to regular Americans whose egos, I suspect, aren't quite so brittle that they need to pretend that fifth place is actually fourth place.