Why NPR Had to Delete Its Tweet About Boston's Mayor

Matt Vespa | November 16, 2021 4:30 PM

You can’t make them happy. They’ll never be happy. Even when they make history—it’s not enough. Michelle Wu is the first woman and first person of color to occupy the mayor’s office in Boston. And yet, National Public Radio tweeted “while many are hailing it as a turning point, others see it as a more of a disappointment that the three Black candidates couldn’t even come close.”

NPR deleted the tweet, but the article still lamented about how people of color are somehow not making history even though they just did:

For the first time in its history, Boston is inaugurating a newly-elected mayor on Tuesday who is not a white man. Michelle Wu – who's Asian American, is the first woman and first person of color elected to lead the city. While many are hailing it as a major turning point, others see it as more of a disappointment that the three Black candidates in the race couldn't even come close.
Many in Boston were hopeful that this would be the year, in this time of racial reckoning, that Boston might elect its first Black mayor, as most of the nation's 30 largest cities have already done.
Three Black candidates were in the race, and one even had the advantage of running as an incumbent, after automatically inheriting the job – as an interim- when former Mayor Marty Walsh left to become Secretary of Labor in the Biden administration. And yet, neither Acting Mayor Kim Janey, nor the others, even made it to the final run-off election this month.
"I got home, and I cried," says Danny Rivera, an artist and civil rights activist in Boston. "I cried my eyes out because I don't know the next time we'll see a Black mayor in our city."
“We realize we don't always get things right the first time, and our previous tweet/headline misrepresented the story,” the publication later posted. “We deleted the previous tweet, which was causing harm, and have updated the story.”