USA Today ran an opinion column on July 22 arguing that Caitlin Clark’s complaints about flopping carry echoes of Emmett Till’s lynching; two days later, the same paper reported that Clark had skipped the WNBA All-Star Orange Carpet to get her hair done, which was also false. One outlet, one athlete, forty-eight hours, two separate errors serious enough to require a public fix. The odds on that being a coincidence get long fast; what it looks like instead is a copy desk that stopped reading its own copy before running Clark’s name in a headline.
Start with the worse of the two. Nancy Armour’s column tied the All-Star Game’s Chicago setting to the city where Emmett Till’s funeral was held in 1955, then stretched the comparison across Clark’s on-court disputes with officials — the column argued that the fallout endangers Black and queer players in the league. Here’s the sentence an editor let through:
“there is a white nationalist element to Clark’s fandom that is deeply, deeply problematic,” and when Clark disputes a foul, “those racists see her as a white woman in need of saving and take matters into their own hands.”
Armour later called the comparison “inartful” and said she’d lacked appropriate context, which is a genteel way of describing an essay that used a teenager’s murder to explain a foul call. She didn’t delete her X account so much as lock the door and kill the porch light, restricting it rather than closing it, and USA Today attached an editor’s note promising “further context and clarity” without ever specifying what context makes that sentence acceptable. A paper executive went further, defending the piece as clearly labeled Opinion, as though the label were the part anyone was disputing.
Most newsrooms have something functioning like brakes: an editor who reads a lynching comparison before it runs under the masthead, a desk that flags the sentence where a columnist accuses half her subject’s fanbase of vigilante racism. USA Today’s version of brakes appears to be bolted to the dashboard and connected to nothing, which is the only way you get a paper careening through two unrelated collisions with the same athlete inside one work week and still calling each one, afterward, a regrettable one-off instead of what it plainly is — the predictable output of nobody touching the pedal.
The second collision arrived two days later, when USA Today reported that Clark had missed the Orange Carpet because she was in Des Moines getting her hair done, built entirely off an Instagram post of her in a salon chair. She plays for the Indiana Fever, but that day she wasn’t representing them at all; she was attending a charity event her own foundation was hosting, and the haircut was prep for that dinner, not an excuse to duck the league’s carpet. 247Sports reporter David Eickholt didn’t bother with diplomacy: “She went back to Des Moines because the Caitlin Clark Foundation was hosting an event. Hard to even put into words how irresponsible this is.”
To USA Today’s credit, this one got fixed fast. The paper’s own account posted the correction the same day:
https://twitter.com/USATODAY/status/2080706812928749849
Same-day, on the record, no hedging — genuinely better than how the Till column got handled. But that’s the tell, not the redemption. A newsroom that can correct itself within hours when the mistake is a haircut and can’t manage anything faster than a vague editor’s note when the mistake invokes a lynching is telling you exactly which errors it considers embarrassing and which ones it considers merely regrettable. The quick fixes are reserved for the stories that make the brand look sloppy. The slow ones are for the stories that make it look something worse than sloppy.
None of this requires relitigating whether Clark gets covered fairly, which is its own tired argument and usually just feeds the discourse machine that swallows every performance whole. This is a narrower complaint, and a more damning one: an institution ran two factually indefensible stories about the same person in two days, and neither failure traces back to some impossible-to-catch error. One required an editor to sit with a sentence comparing flopping to lynching and decide it was fine. The other required nobody to check a public event calendar before publishing a guess as fact. Both are checkable. Neither got checked. That’s the same inconsistency that’s dogged coverage of her all year, just compressed into a single ugly week instead of spread across a season.
USA Today fixed the hair appointment story by dinnertime. Whoever waved the Emmett Till sentence through is, as far as anyone can tell, still on staff, still assigning stories with Clark’s name in the headline, and still one careless Tuesday from doing something like it again.
