Investigation: Obama's People Drugged, Force-Fed Meds to Border Kids
The journalism hall of shame keeps getting more crowded.
A blockbuster report last week by the Center for Investigative Reporting cast a glaring light on a practice of U.S. authorities forcing immigrant children who have been separated from their parents to take psychiatric medicines – and forcibly injecting them if they resisted.
But in its eagerness to damn President Donald Trump and his administration for yet another aspect of handling illegal alien minors, according to a commentary writer for the Washington Examiner, the report left out one crucial detail.
The practice began during the Obama administration, and three of the four minors who are plaintiffs in a lawsuit naming Attorney General Jeff Sessions as a defendant were actually drugged long before Trump even took the oath of office.
As reported by the Washington Examiner’s Philip Wegmann, a lengthy article published Wednesday by Reveal, a publication of the Center for Investigative Reporting, failed to note anywhere in the text that the practice of drugging illegal alien children at a Houston-area social services contractor was begun while Obama was in the White House.
“The reporting is detailed and horrific, but the story creates a fake villain,” Wegmann wrote. “The first words of the piece are ‘President Donald Trump.’ The article blames Trump and his current zero tolerance policy on immigration for creating “a zombie army of children.” That is misleading at best.
“Three of the four children cited in the report were drugged during the Obama administration. According to federal court filings, only one occurred while Trump was actually president. The other three happened in 2016. That timing is left out of the story, which, after opening with Trump’s policies, never mentions the years of the specific incidents of mistreatment.”
“Misleading at best”? Wegmann is being kind.
As he noted, the first three words of the piece are “President Donald Trump.” The piece was published in the middle of a nationwide hysteria over the status of children of illegal aliens who have been separated from their parents. The wrong conclusion is obviously easy to draw — intentionally easy, apparently.
Only a reader willing to dig into the lawsuit filings that are linked to the article would have a clue that the practice is not some monstrosity cooked up by the administration of the man who’s now holds the presidency.
There is one hint in the article that the contractor – the Shiloh Treatment Center – had a history of problems that predate the Trump administration. Namely, U.S. Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee had been calling for the center to be closed as early as 2014. (This might be the first and only time the regrettable Rep. Lee might not have been utterly wrong about something.)
But the editors of the ironically named Reveal had to know that the percentage of readers willing to read into the actual court filings linked with the article would be vanishingly small. Likewise, the offhand reference to Lee doesn’t so much establish a time frame for problems at the center as emphasize the false impression that Democrats are the party that actually cares about children.
It looks like there’s more than “misleading” that’s happening here. It looks a lot like a deliberate deception, a sleight of journalistic hand that pretends to “reveal” some fact when conveying an idea that’s completely different from reality.
And judging by some of the Twitter reactions to the Reveal story, the idea was successfully conveyed.
WTF?! What else can possibly come out about these detention centers. This angers to no end. Drugging children? This administration has got to go!#WorstAdministrationEver #WORSTPRESIDENTEVER
— hypocrites are running the house into the ground!! (@pfarrside) June 21, 2018
https://twitter.com/prog_mustard/status/1009517745388470272
How about this one from Roger Hodge, deputy editor of the Intercept:
Trumpian child care: inject immigrant children with psychotropic drugs to make them settle down and stop crying. This was before zero tolerance. https://t.co/BZFE2sVZZA
— Roger D. Hodge (@RogerDHodge) June 20, 2018
Not exactly “Trumpian,” considering it started before Trump was even the president.
This isn’t to defend the practice of drugging minors against their will. It’s also not to condemn it out of hand. There’s simply not enough information available from the Reveal piece or Wegmann’s commentary to know if it was necessary, medically sound or ethically permissible.
But what is absolutely clear is depth to which anti-Trump journalists are willing to go to smear the administration with loosely presented facts.
Given the hoaxes that have already been perpetrated surrounding the story of the “separated families” there’s no denying what’s happening.
Liberals have lied to the American people about caged children (using pictures taken during the Obama administration or outright staged for propaganda purposes). They’ve deliberately misrepresented the picture of the little girl who made the cover of Time magazine.
Major media (including USA Today) picked up a story about 1,450 children allegedly “lost” by the Trump administration when it wasn’t true.
And these are just a few of the examples.
The “Russian collusion” coverage has been skewed and tainted, but for sheer, outrageous misstatments and half-truths, it’s doubtful the country has seen distortion like this from the media since the “hands up, don’t shoot” lies of the Ferguson, Missouri, demonstrations turned into a national movement by Black Lives Matter thugs.
But the truth will come out eventually. And it’s going to hurt the liberal media more than it hurts the rest of the country.
Until then, the journalism hall of shame is just going to keep getting bigger.
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