One day after Walmart removed a shirt bearing the words "Rope. Tree. Journalist. Some assembly required" from its website, a hoodie with the same design was still available online at Amazon.com. It was pulled around midday Friday.
'Rope. Tree. Journalist' lynching shirt design pulled from Amazon
Walmart had removed the T-shirt design from its website after a complaint was made by a journalists' group.
December 1, 2017 at 7:45PM
The apparel design was listed in both places through third-party sellers that allow people to post their own designs for sale.
The Amazon hoodie was made available through a company called TeeScribe.
Teespring, which sold the shirt online through Walmart, said it had been removed, adding that the company was working to prevent such content from slipping through its filters.
The T-shirt on the Walmart website originally came under review after a complaint from the Radio Television Digital News Association on Thursday. In the complaint, the group wrote that the shirts could "inflame the passions of those who either don't like, or don't understand, the news media. At worst, they openly encourage violence targeting journalists."
On the Amazon site, the hoodie, available in a variety of sizes for about $45, had a single 1-star rating, with a review that noted the design "promotes violence against journalists, which is an attack on our Constitution and the First Amendment."
The owner of Amazon.com, Jeff Bezos, also owns the Washington Post.
The same shirt design had previously been spotted at a Donald Trump rally in Minnesota just before he was elected in November 2016.
The party supply company told employees on Friday that it’s going out of business.
