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Steve McQueen and Brad Pitt’s 12 Years a Slave took home the 2014 Oscar’s top honor last night but some media outlets just couldn’t get with times and bask in the positive light.

The News-Gazette, based out of Champaign, IL tried to make a play on words involving the heralded film’s subject matter and ended up eating crow.

Jim Crow, that is.

The headline read “12 Years a Slave escapes with top Oscar,” in an attempt to paint a picture of “slavery escaping” in the Academy Award’s pool of nominations.

Seeing that Lupita Nyong’o had won the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress earlier in the evening for the very same film, it wasn’t as shocking for the flick to grab the win, as the headline tried to suggest.

The paper later amended the title to “12 Years a Slave’ wins best picture at Oscars; ‘Gravity’ wins 7 statues,” but the people of Twitter had already snatched screenshots of the original title and spoke their disapproval.

Twitter user @MsPackyetti posted “Did NOone think about this before it went out? Shameful. Correct this fast!” @BeezHunny agreed with the previous user stating “12 years a slave headline is pretty tone-deaf. Did anyone give that a second eye before publishing?”

The offending screengrabs can be found in the following gallery. Middle America, we got’s to do better.

[The Root]

Photo: Twitter/Ms Packyetti, Beez Hunny, Facebook/Fox Searchlight

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