Media Deletes Anti-Trump Immigration Story After Learning Obama Responsible, Not Trump
“Children in cages” didn’t go away even after it was proved that the mephitic story actually traced its provenance to the Obama administration. At that level, I suppose, we should congratulate Reuters and Agence France Presse for actually doing the right thing and retracting a story about immigration after it became clear that it was the 44th, not the 45th, president who was responsible for it.
Of course, it would have helped if they didn’t just delete the story entirely.
On Tuesday, the United Nations reported that the United States had 100,000 children detained for immigration-related reasons, according to The Daily Caller.
At newsrooms around the country, the cry went up: Hot diggity! I mean, not that there were children who were detained for immigration-related reasons, but it was one of those great stories about the current president’s draconian immigration policies that play well with liberal audiences.
Alas, though, there was a problem. The U.N. quickly made it clear that the numbers on the detained children were from 2015, back when the sainted one was still in office. All of a sudden, for AFP and Reuters, the story was no longer newsworthy! Both stories were deleted.
AFP is withdrawing this story.
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
— AFP news agency (@AFP) November 19, 2019
AFP wouldn’t give a quote to The Daily Caller as to why the immigration story was newsworthy if it happened under Trump but wasn’t newsworthy if it happened under Obama. After all, the children were being detained for immigration-related reasons, just during an earlier period.
If anything, AFP could have made it clear that the Obama years weren’t as progressive as remember them and that the Trump years were probably even worse. That fits the narrative, right? Why even bother to delete it when it can easily be fixed?
Reuters gave a statement to The Daily Caller regarding why it killed the story — although it, too, refused to say why it ceased to become newsworthy when the president under whose term changed.
“Reuters decided to withdraw its story after the United Nations issued a statement on November 19 saying the number of children in detention was not current but was for the year 2015,” the statement read.
A similar statement was issued on the page where the story was originally housed.
“A Nov. 18 story headlined ‘U.S. has world’s highest rate of children in detention -U.N. study’ is withdrawn. The United Nations issued a statement on Nov. 19 saying the number was not current but was for the year 2015. No replacement story will be issued.”
Other outlets changed the story as opposed to deleting it entirely.
The Associated Press, for instance, quoted the head of the U.N. Global Study on Children Deprived of Liberty, which was responsible for the numbers, saying that “that figure was drawn from a U.N. refugee agency report citing data from 2015, the latest figure his team could find. That was before U.S. President Donald Trump, whose policies on migration have drawn criticism, was elected.”
The head of the agency also “said the figure of over 100,000 referred to the cumulative number of migrant children held in detention at any point during that year, whether ‘for two days or eight months or the whole year,’ not all simultaneously.”
But perhaps this was one of the reasons that the story ended up getting deleted: “New U.S. government data released this month found 69,550 migrant children have been held in U.S. government custody over the past year.”
Well, that’s a bit of a media downer, right? Remember that part about the Trump years probably being even worse? Never mind that.
Even Donald Trump Jr. got in on making fun of the story:
So you’re deleting the story because it actually looks good for Trump? I just wanna make sure we’re clear because you look like a bunch of morons.
Why wouldn’t you correct and leave it up? I guess that would be too much real news? Jokers! https://t.co/os7fEwS67d
— Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) November 19, 2019
The takeaway from this story is that the establishment media’s interest in truth is rather limited. There is a story here, although not the one they wanted. So, in the case of AFP and Reuters, they just deleted it. It’s not news if Obama was responsible, after all. I wonder why.
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