ABC openly admitted Sunday to having published “fake news” – their words, not mine – about the Trump administration “losing” 1,500 migrant children, a debunked story that quickly caught fire and spawned countless hashtag campaigns and anti-ICE protests across the country. (Here's MSNBC's Chris Hayes boo-hooing over the whole nonsensical thing about a month ago.)
Now, well after the myth has been permanently ensconced as fact in the brains of millions of rapid anti-Trumpers nationwide, ABC's admitting the entire thing was false – but, in a stunning feat of mental gymnastics, they claim the bogus story ended up being a good thing.
In an article actually entitled, “A fake news story helps expose a real crisis,” author Lauren Pearle admits the Trump administration was unfairly accused of having “lost” 1,500 kids who’d crossed the southwest U.S. border illegally – a claim I’d disputed in a video roughly four weeks ago, only to be accused of Nazism by radical progressives.
But by ABC’s own admission (and as I'd pointed out), the administration didn’t “lose” anyone; they’d simply placed these kids with sponsors, usually a family member, who didn’t respond when the government tried to check up on the child.
But despite the whole thing being a total load of baseless crap, as ABC now admits, the network still suggests the “fake news” ended up being a great thing because it blew the lid off the Trump administration’s family separation policy. Here's an actual excerpt from ABC's piece:
“But all the digging had uncovered a separate issue that had also been reported, but had not yet captured the nation’s full attention: the Trump administration’s practice of separating migrant children from their parents at the southern border, which accelerated under the ‘zero-tolerance’ policy announced in April.
“...That outcry, which reached a fever pitch in recent weeks, took months to unfold. And it largely began with a search for children who probably weren’t missing after all."
Pearle doesn’t point out, of course, that the Obama administration also had a policy of temporarily separating families at the border (a fact MSNBC finally and begrudgingly admitted after weeks of slamming Trump), albeit to a lesser extent given the administration’s policy of simply releasing illegal aliens into the country without so much as a slap on the wrist. In fact, the policy of family separation was first launched after the Obama administration was sued for holding migrant children in detention facilities with their parents for extended periods of time – a court case that ended when the Ninth Circuit ruled these kids couldn’t be held for more than 20 days.
When the Trump administration reversed the previous policy of simply letting illegal alien families go free, that Obama-era court decision resulted in temporary family separations.
But never mind all that, because ABC has an agenda to push – one that apparently includes openly justifying the media's peddling of fake news in order to achieve a larger goal of spreading…still more fake news.