One of the most common actions seen in the press today is the knee-jerk reaction to something said by the right. Obviously, Donald Trump is the primary recipient of these mandatory fact checks and other refutations, but this is also often the case with comments from other Republicans and conservative media outlets. From the latter category, Fox News is often questioned for its content.
Often these standard challenges are made without fully verifying the details, or worse, once they are found to be correct, the comment is reworded and other elements are imported to justify citing the intended target. That is the case with an article from the New York Times He criticizes Fox News personality Rachel Campos-Duffy after she interviewed Donald Trump (double the reason to doubt the content!) and accuses the host of providing misinformation:
Former President Donald J. Trump and his surrogates have repeatedly accused the Biden administration of losing tens of thousands of migrant children while distorting, mixing and inflating government statistics. The misleading claim, now a staple of Mr. Trump’s Trump speeches, appears to have originated on Fox News and is spreading like a snowball.
Depending on your perspective, this seems either pathetic or hilarious. The first question is: Why is this being reported now? The interview between Trump and Campos-Duffy took place in June and, the newspaper indicates, he has made it a regular part of his rally speeches. (RedState contacted both reporter Linda Qiu and the Times’ fact-check department but received no response.)
What’s even stranger is why Campos-Duffy is being lambasted over this news, even though the Times itself has claimed that the details are there. It seems to be more about a terminology conflict. According to the news agency There are actually tens of thousands of immigrant children who are missing:
Ms. Campos-Duffy’s claim referred to migrant children arriving at the border unaccompanied by adults. According to government protocols, once the children are apprehended by border officials, they are placed in the care of the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of Refugee Resettlement. The New York Times reported last year that the bureau, which screens children by telephone, was unable to reach 85,000 children in 2021 and 2022, or about a third of cases. The Times did not report that the children were “lost,” but that they were more vulnerable to exploitative and illegal working conditions.
What’s the point of saying this is a false claim? So the children are not “lost”, they just have no idea where they are or who they might be with?! This seems like a desperate attempt to thread a needle to make a statement. It could well be that Trump achieves a similar result, but that is worse in comparison. As the Times notes, children went “missing” in similar ways during the Trump years, but the numbers were far more understandable — about 1,500.
The most vital detail the paper can rely on is that Democrats claimed at the time that those 1,500 were lost. When Democrats accused the Trump administration of “losing” unaccompanied children, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) came forward. said in 2018 that these claims were “completely false.” This means that a government agency rejects criticism of its performance – or lack thereof. But ultimately, this is what we see: Today the New York Times cites an excuse made during the Trump years to excuse the Biden administration for losing/misplacing a number on a much larger figure / entered incorrect quantity.
To cap off the incorrect transmission, we then see that the Times has resorted to a practice common in the press today. Only after the article is first published will they receive a comment from Fox News on the exact topic that concerns the channel.
After this NYT article was published, Fox News said that the exploit of the word “lost” was “a matter of semantics and not a factual inaccuracy.”
