By Kyle Smith
November 21, 2019
So the United States has “the world’s highest rate of children in detention.” Is this worth reporting? Maybe, maybe not. Nevertheless, Agence France-Presse, or AFP, and Reuters did report it, attributing the information to a “United Nations study” on migrant children detained at the US-Mexico border.
Then the two agencies retracted the story. Deleted, withdrew, demolished. If they could have used one of those Men in Black memory-zappers on us, they would have. Sheepishly, the two news organizations explained that, you see, the UN data was from 2015 — part of a border crackdown that had begun years earlier.
We all know who the president was in 2015. It wasn’t evil, child-caging monster President Trump. It was that nice, compassionate, child-caging monster President Barack Obama.
Zap. The story made Obama look bad. Hence the story was removed. Not updated or corrected, removed.
I know it’s a heavy news environment. Who can keep up? But try to remember this one, because it’s instructive. People think news organizations flat-out fabricate stories. That isn’t often the case. Fake news is a problem that pops up here and there, but the much more systematic and deeply entrenched attack on truth is the casual, everyday bias of reporters.
AFP and Reuters deleted a story that was, in a narrow sense, true — that a UN study claimed the United States had some 100,000 children in migrant-related detention. The United Nations is horribly biased against America and the West. Still, on the level of lazy, news-release-driven journalism, the locked-up-kids story was minimally valid.
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