After Washington Post technology writer Taylor Lorenz was criticized on social media for errors in her Thursday column about YouTube content creators’ coverage of the Depp/Heard trial, the newspaper issued a correction on Friday.
The correction, which also addressed a quote that had been misattributed to Depp’s lawyer Adam Waldman, reads: “A previous version of this story inaccurately attributed to Adam Waldman a quote describing how he contacted some Internet influencers. That quote has been removed. The story has also been amended to note The Post’s attempts to reach Alyte Mazeika and ThatUmbrellaGuy for comment. Previous versions omitted or inaccurately described these attempts.”
A rep for the Washington Post declined to comment about potential disciplinary action for Lorenz and referred TheWrap to the published correction.
ThatUmbrellaGuy tweeted that Lorenz did not reach out to him before running the story, which included estimates of how much money he made from his pro-Depp videos about the defamation trial.
“Taylor Lorenz wrote an obvious smear piece conflating Depp support with financial gain. She flagrantly ignored the fact I’ve covered this case for year…. she lied about contacting me in The Washington Post and tried covering this up AFTER I called it out publicly,” he wrote on Friday in a series of tweets.
Lorenz’s story also referenced Mazeika’s April Business Insider profile, which stated she made as much as $5,000 a week for livestreaming the trial. But Mazeika, whose YouTube channel is called Legal Bytes, told the National Review that Lorenz did not contact her until after being “called out” on Twitter.
