This would be funny, if it wasn’t just so sad. Several media outlets had their credibility put to the test this week (and shocker, failed miserably) after a report from the United Nations out Monday left out a pretty significant detail. The report appeared to condemn President Trump over the "inhuman" border policy, calling the U.S. out for having the "world’s highest rate of children in detention [centers]." The media rushed to share the report as more bad news for Trump. However they were singing a very different tune when the UN report’s author later clarified that his data was from 2015, when President Obama was in office.
Unsurprisingly, a number of outlets rushed to salvage their reports upon finding this out. But instead of keeping the reports up with a correction for the dates, they scrubbed their ENTIRE stories.
Agence France-Presse, or AFP News Agency was one of the first media outlets to tout the UN Report. They tweeted Tuesday morning, “Breaking: More than 100,000 children in migration-related US detention: UN.” That tweet is still up on Twitter. But after finding out the report used numbers from the Obama presidency, a full day later, they pledged to delete the story.
AFP is withdrawing this story.
— AFP news agency (@AFP) November 19, 2019
The author of the report has clarified that his figures do not represent the number of children currently in migration-related US detention, but the total number of children in migration-related US detention in 2015.
We will delete the story. https://t.co/p30UjEWl7u
Reuters, the Associated Press, NBC News and Al Jazeera also deleted their stories. After Huffington Post republished the initial Reuters story, senior politics reporter Jennifer Bendery, tweeted mockingly initially, “Congratulations America. We now have the world's highest rate of children in detention, per a United Nations study.”
She has since deleted this tweet.
NPR also deleted their entire story. Their headline was changed from “U.N. Expert Faults U.S. for ‘Inhuman Treatment’ and High Incarceration of Children” to “Correction: Report Temporarily Withdrawn Because of Error in Study Data” at 6:53pm ET, Tuesday. That “error” wasn’t clarified in the subsequent paragraph, which simply stated: “We have temporarily withdrawn this story about U.S. incarceration rates of children because the U.N. study’s author has acknowledged a significant error in the data. We will post a revised article with more complete information as soon as possible.”
Nearly a full day later, it hasn’t been updated.
Proving once again, that if the facts don’t fit their narrative, the media’s solution is always to bury them.
