We ran the wrong headline about Trump firing the FTC commissioners

FTC Commissioners Rebecca Kelly Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya.

On Tuesday, the president of the United States fired the Democratic commissioners of the Federal Trade Commission in clear contravention of what has been the law since 1935. News outlets — including The Verge — all went up with their articles as fast as they could. The headlines and stories across the board were pretty similar; the blowback from readers was evenly distributed. “This is wildly illegal,” one person wrote in The Washington Post’s comment section. “Just say that. Don’t say the fired people said it was illegal. Say it as the Washington Post when you know it’s true. Democracy dies, thanks in part to this rag.”

We also caught flack for our own headline, which put “illegal” in quotation marks, attributing it to the Democratic commissioners. “@theverge.com, y’all need a more accurate headline,” a reader told us on Bluesky. “They’re not SAYING they were illegally fired, they WERE illegally fired. The precedent set in Humphrey’s Executor almost a century ago makes that crystal clear – but you don’t address that until the next to last paragraph. DO BETTER!”

This is a pretty typical dynamic when the news hedges, equivocates, or neuters its lan …

Read the full story at The Verge.