Big Mistakes. Tiny Corrections.

Every single journalist has heard this complaint at least once:

Newspapers sometimes print front-page stories that contain mistakes, but when it’s time to correct the errors it’s done in minuscule print, tucked away on page 2.

There’s no intelligent counter to this. It’s absolutely true.

Which brings us to Reuters. On Monday that news agency trumpeted a shocking story that quoted an expert with the United Nations’ human rights office. He claimed that more than 100,000 children were being held in migrant detention in this country. The highest number in the world.

It fueled the narrative that the evil Trump administration hates illegal immigrants and brown people and is callously tossing tots in cages.

The backlash against Trump’s immigration policies was swift and predictable.

“This is a disgusting result of Trump's family separation policies — pushed by Stephen Miller who has cited white nationalist propaganda in promoting his views. It's also, apparently, a violation of a U.N. treaty, the Convention on the Rights of the Child," squawked the DNC’s “War Room.”

Bernie Sanders chimed in on Twitter, calling the number “immoral.”

Just one problem. Turns out the figures came from 2015. When Barack Obama was president.

Ahem.

Of course that was back when no one in the media cared about migrant kids because they were too busy slobbering over Michelle Obama’s buff biceps.

Instead of setting the record straight, Reuters simply took down the erroneous story. Here, see for yourself.

GENEVA (Reuters) - A Nov. 18 story headlined “U.S. has world’s highest rate of children in detention -U.N. study” is withdrawn. The United Nations issued a statement on Nov. 19 saying the number was not current but was for the year 2015. No replacement story will be issued.

No replacement story.

Of course not. Trump is the bad guy, not Obama. This was only a story as long as it bashed the current president not his beloved predecessor.

Likewise, a number of lefties who erupted in outrage over the number of kids in detention deleted their embarrassing Tweets. The DNC’s reaction vanished. So did Bernie Sanders’.

Geez, if 100,000 kids in detention was immoral and disgusting when Trump supposedly held them, wasn’t it immoral when Obama did it?

Nope

To its credit, The Associated Press published a full story, correcting the erroneous report.

“On Monday, Manfred Nowak, who leads a U.N. Global Study on Children Deprived of Liberty that was published this week, told reporters: ’We have more than — still more than — 100,000 children in migration-related detention in the United States of America.’ The Associated Press and other major news organizations reported that figure.

“But on Tuesday, he 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. That was before U.S. President Donald Trump, whose policies on migration have drawn criticism, was elected.”

Once it was clear the number was from happier, Obama-ier times, this expert quickly clarified that the number wasn’t so bad after all. It represented the cumulative number of kids who were held during 2015. Some for just a day or two. There were never 100,000 kids in custody at one time.

Odd, isn’t it? No one felt a need to point out that the startling 100,000 number was a year-long figure when it was Donald Trump locking up children.

Any wonder the public doesn’t trust the media?