#Washington Post draws heat for changing a story on immigration

The Washington Post is drawing heat yet again — this time for changes it made to a story about immigration along the southern border.

A post that ran on March 25 initially carried a headline that read: “There’s no migrant ‘surge’ at the U.S. southern border. Here’s the data.”

The revised headline reads: “The migrant ‘surge’ at the US southern border is actually a predictable pattern.”

There were also changes in the accompanying text. The original version, for example, read: “what we’re seeing in other words isn’t a surge or crisis, but a predictable seasonal shift.”

The new version doesn’t weigh on whether it is a surge or not but says simply: “What we’re seeing right now is a predictable seasonal shift.”

It’s the second embarrassing flub for the Beltway paper owned by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos amid criticisms of the media world in general for being softer on Biden than it had been on Trump.

On March 15, the Washington Post added a lengthy correction to a bombshell report from early January that had claimed the then-President Trump in a phone call to Georgia’s top elections investigator told them to “find the fraud” and that they would be “a national hero” if they did so.

But an actual recording of the call, showed the original source had misquoted the president’s words from that call.

“Two months after publication of this story, the Georgia secretary of state released an audio recording of President Donald Trump’s December phone call with the state’s top elections investigator. The recording revealed that The Post misquoted Trump’s comments on the call, based on information provided by a source,” the paper said in a 129-word correction.

“Trump did not tell the investigator to ‘find the fraud’ or say she would be ‘a national hero’ if she did so. Instead, Trump urged the investigator to scrutinize ballots in Fulton County, Ga., asserting she would find ‘dishonesty’ there. He also told her that she had ‘the most important job in the country right now.’”

That report was particularly upsetting to Trump supporters since the erroneous words attributed to Trump were cited in the articles of impeachment.

While the latest flub was not deemed quite as egregious, it still drew flak on Twitter for seemingly downplaying an issue that has been giving the Joe Biden administration headaches.