Washington Post caught withholding material facts in story about passport fraud

Red States:
...
In an amazing act of journalism in the Age of Trump, the Huffington Post has posted this: Bombshell Washington Post Story On Trump Passport Crackdown Withheld, Distorted Key Facts.
But the Post withheld key data, mischaracterized information and lobbed an allegation of fraud at a deceased doctor without speaking to his family members, who complained publicly, HuffPost has found. The piece has been substantially altered three times, including Thursday after multiple queries from HuffPost.

A Washington Post story alleged that Donald Trump’s administration is increasingly scrutinizing birth certificates signed by some midwives, but State Department data contradicts that claim.
The paper cited a number of specific policies to support its allegation of a crackdown: supposedly heightened scrutiny of birth certificates signed by midwives suspected of peddling fraudulent documents, supposedly unprecedented passport denials to people born far from the border, and a supposedly new focus on babies delivered by one Texas doctor.

All three practices predate Trump.
…
But when the State Department provided HuffPost the raw number of passport denials in suspect midwife cases along the border, those numbers contradicted the Post’s report. The number of denials steadily dropped, from a peak of 1,465 in 2015 to 971 last year. As of last month, the State Department appeared to be on pace to end 2018 with still fewer denials than last year. The total rejections in these cases since Trump took office number fewer than 1,600 ― not thousands.
This is pretty incredible and it is difficult to see how this string of errors was possibly made in good faith. The scope and starting date of three separate programs were misrepresented in the WaPo article while the Huffington Post was able to actually talk to the relevant agencies and get the real story.

Like the nasty political hit that the New York Times ran last week on Nikki Haley, it is sort of amazing that these monumentally skewed and distorted stories only run in one direction: against the Trump administration.
There is more.

The last paragraph nails it.  If there is a story the mainstream media thinks it can get away with skewing against Trump they will do it regardless of the facts.  These stories are not accidents. They are deliberate and show a lack of quality control by the editors who are supposed to catch this type of error.   The Huffington Post deserves credit for its coverage of this abuse.

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