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In another publicity stunt designed to remind us that not all of YouTube's content is pirated from big media companies, the Google-owned online-video site has been asking its users to post videos posing the questions they'd like to ask at tonight's Democratic presidential-candidate debates. The New York Times' Kit Seeley has deigned to take notice. But in doing so, she made a major gaffe that has one of the people she wrote about accusing her of racism. Here are the details.


Zennie Abraham made two of the videos cited by Seelye, who wrote about each as if it was made by a different person:

In other words, she sourced the same person for two different points of information, but to the lazy eye and finger that would not bother to click on the links — yeah, right, — it looks like she's writing about two different people. Nope. She's not.

Oh, and Seelye's lack of attention gets worse:

And why "A black man standing in front" of a check cashing center, when I wasn't even STANDING IN FRONT OF A CHECK CASHING CENTER. THAT'S A BANK OF AMERICA ATM!" It just goes to show you how stupid racism is, in this case, institutional racism, where the person thinks they're doing no harm at all in reaching for a stereotype, even if the stereotype tells the story incorrectly.

Ah, the irony. Seelye was hoping to write an article about the struggles faced by presidential candidates in using participatory online media. And instead, she's the one who's struggling.