The Economist withdrew a nearly comically misguided piece of writing from its website on Friday, admitting that a book review that called for a more objective treatment of slavery should never have made it through the editing process.

The magazine had published the review of Edward Baptist's book “The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism” on Thursday. The review, which, like nearly everything in The Economist, did not carry a byline, lamented that all the white people in the book—namely, the people who owned the slaves—were portrayed as bad for some reason:

Mr Baptist has not written an objective history of slavery. Almost all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains. This is not history; it is advocacy.

Since even the most casual observer might imagine that a book about the mass enslavement of black people would inevitably portray the slaves as "victims," the assertion that such a study required a "fair and balanced" approach drew near-universal befuddlement. The Atlantic's Ta-Nehisi Coates had one of the more pointed responses:

Read a book about the Holocaust. Must be unfair because it painted all the Nazis in a bad light. — Ta-Nehisi Coates (@tanehisicoates) September 4, 2014

By Friday morning, the magazine had revised its opinion and apologized: