Several news outlets retracted an article which falsely attributed the statistics of Obama-era migration-related child detentions to President Donald Trump from a U.N. report.
The Agence France-Presse (AFP) news agency, Reuters, NPR, and The Associated Press were among the media organizations to withdraw their reports which claimed over 100,000 children were in migration-related U.S. detention.
The media outlets took their figures from a U.N. report, the author of which has since admitted the numbers are from a U.N. refugee agency report citing data from 2015, when Barack Obama was president. In his report, Manfred Nowak, an expert from the U.N. Global Study on Children Deprived of Liberty, claimed it was the “world’s highest rate” of detained children.
“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 U.S. detention, but the total number of children in migration-related U.S. detention in 2015. We will delete the story,” AFP tweeted on Nov. 19.
Several news outlets retracted an article which falsely attributed the statistics of Obama-era migration-related child detentions to President Donald Trump from a U.N. report.
The Agence France-Presse (AFP) news agency, Reuters, NPR, and The Associated Press were among the media organizations to withdraw their reports which claimed over 100,000 children were in migration-related U.S. detention.
The media outlets took their figures from a U.N. report, the author of which has since admitted the numbers are from a U.N. refugee agency report citing data from 2015, when Barack Obama was president. In his report, Manfred Nowak, an expert from the U.N. Global Study on Children Deprived of Liberty, claimed it was the “world’s highest rate” of detained children.
“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 U.S. detention, but the total number of children in migration-related U.S. detention in 2015. We will delete the story,” AFP tweeted on Nov. 19.
The Associated Press also deleted its article, but wrote a substitute story where it highlighted the figure that was incorrectly cited by Nowak.
“But on Tuesday, he [Nowak] told The AP that figure was drawn from a U.N. refugee agency report citing data from 2015, the latest figure his team could find,” the new AP article reads.
