Fact Check: The Atlantic Did NOT Run Story Titled ‘To Save Democracy Harris May Need To Steal An Election’ — Screenshot Is Fake
Did The Atlantic publish an article under the title “To Save Democracy Harris May Need To Steal An Election”? No, that’s not true: The magazine denied publishing that headline or any such story under it. The manipulated screenshot shared on social media digitally replaced the authentic headline in a 2021 article with a fake one.
The claim appeared in a post (archived here) on X, formerly known as Twitter, on October 15, 2024. It opened:
No way.
The post continued with what looked like a screenshot of the beginnings of an Atlantic article:
To Save Democracy
Harris May Need To Steal
An Election
Constitutional scholars are already worrying
about another January 6 crisis, and they warn
that the next election might be harder to save.
This is how it appeared on X at the time of writing:
(Source: X screenshot taken on Tue Oct 15 22:24:12 2024 UTC)
What the post presented as an article published by The Atlantic was a fake screenshot.
On October 15, 2024, the magazine issued a statement (archived here) that refuted the claim:
This headline is fabricated. No such article has ever been published by The Atlantic. The fake headline distorts an Atlantic article that was published on October 6, 2021, which ran under the headline ‘Kamala Harris Might Have to Stop the Steal.’
(Source: Atlantic screenshot taken on Tue Oct 15 22:33:45 2024)
A Google search for the precise wording (archived here) from the purported headline across the Atlantic website produced a single result: The magazine statement cited above.
A search for the purported headline across Google News (archived here) didn’t produce any results corroborating its existence.
