The Free Press corrected a claim in Maya Sulkin’s video about Michigan senator-elect Abdul El-Sayed’s victory speech, clarifying that the address was delivered mostly in English.
In a Friday post on X, the outlet said the video had incorrectly described El-Sayed’s acceptance speech as Arabic. The Free Press wrote, “That’s not accurate.” It said El-Sayed spoke mainly in English and used Arabic in a limited number of expressions, and apologized for the error.
An X Community Note counted four Arabic words and calculated that they represented 0.27% of the speech’s total word count. The note excluded El-Sayed’s name when he pronounced it with Arabic inflection.
The Independent reported that The Free Press posted the video on X Wednesday and that it drew more than 1 million views. The outlet said the video used footage of El-Sayed at his Detroit victory event in a critique of Democrats’ use of languages besides English in election-night remarks.