INVESTOR’S BUSINESS DAILY ON THE ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY DEBACLE:

Last Monday afternoon, Entertainment Weekly posted a story in its Books section with the ominous headline: “Hugo Award nominations fall victim to misogynistic, racist voting campaign.”

Within a few hours, the headline changed to: “Correction: Hugo Awards voting campaign sparks controversy.”

That’s some correction. So what happened?

Both versions of the EW story were about the annual Hugo Awards given out to science fiction and fantasy writers. In the original version, EW’s Isabella Biedenharn claimed that “misogynist groups lobbied to nominate only white males for the science fiction book awards,” urging their followers to “cast votes against female writers and writers of color.”

Turns out that the slate of authors recommended by one of the groups, at least, did include women and minorities. Several of them, in fact.

The group’s campaign, in fact, had nothing to do with women or minorities, but an effort “to get talented, worthy, deserving authors who would normally never have a chance (to be) nominated for the supposedly prestigious Hugo awards,” according to Larry Correia, who along with Brad Torgersen, started the “Sad Puppies” campaign to bring more ideological diversity to the Hugo nominations.

“I started this campaign a few years ago,” Correia wrote on his blog, “because I believed that the awards were politically biased and dominated by a few insider cliques. Authors who didn’t belong to these groups or failed to appease them politically were shunned.”

But since the EW reporter didn’t bother to reach out to Correia, or anyone else involved, to check her facts, she apparently didn’t know this.

This story, like the now-completely discredited Rolling Stone “campus rape” article, shows the dangers of an increasingly biased mainstream news media.

Yep. And charges of racism, misogyny, etc. are almost always just political tools to defend insiders against outsiders nowadays.