Florida Newspaper Pulls Op Ed Praising Proud Boys
Credit: Getty Images: Stephanie Keith
July 11, 2022

Over the weekend the Sarasota Herald-Tribune (FL) posted an opinion piece by Melissa Radovich, in which she defended the Proud Boys as caring and loving parents, “Attacking Proud Boys does a disservice to caring school parents.”

This drew immediate criticisms on social media and elsewhere.

Not only was it an insane article, the Florida newspaper did not reveal that Radovich is married to a Proud Boy.

Yikes.

I tweeted out something to the effect that, "Between lynchings, I'm sure they cared about their kids' education."

The pressure against this op-ed went national, and the newspaper pulled down the op-ed and published an explanation from the editor:Guest column about Proud Boys did not meet our standards.

A guest column from June 24 had criticized the author of Sunday's column, and an editor felt it fair to give her a chance to respond. We strive to provide a broad range of views from our community, including opinions in opposition to those of our editorial board.
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Our editorial process failed to keep this column from being published as it appeared, which did not meet our standards. We are adding an additional, higher-level review of the process for accepting and editing guest columns for publication. We will continue to publish varied opinions from across the political spectrum on important local issues. But this decision fell short of our standards, and we apologize to our readers.

Jennifer Orsi

Executive Editor

Mistakes happen, but this was an example of both-siderism at its worst.

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