A New York Times story about Donald Trump’s immigration plan received so much criticism from media watchdogs, that the paper eventually made changes to the story after it was published online.
Times reporter Patrick Healy said Trump was “shelving his plan to deport 11 million undocumented people.” But this doesn’t exactly coincide with Trump remarks on Wednesday night in Arizona.
MTV News senior national correspondent Jamil Smith was among those who bashed the Times story on Twitter.
That @patrickhealynyt story is a systematic failure. How does he write that? How does an editor let that pass?
— Jamil Smith جميل كريم (@JamilSmith) September 1, 2016
Healy’s story was significantly re-written about an hour after it was published and the two versions can be compared on NewsDiffs, a website made by a former Times’ staffer that is dedicated to revealing edits that have been made. TheWrap has also independently confirmed from the Times that the edits were made.
During Trump’s speech on immigration in Arizona on Wednesday night, he discussed deporting undocumented people and specifically touched on the 11 million number. “The truth is, the central issue is not the needs of the 11 million illegal immigrants or however many there may be — and honestly we’ve been hearing that number for years. It’s always 11 million,” Trump said.
Trump said our government actually has “no idea” how many there are, but clearly did not shelve plans of deportation.
“It could be 3 million. It could be 30 million. They have no idea what the number is,” He said. “Day one, my first hour in office, those people are gone… And you can call it deported if you want. The press doesn’t like that term. You can call it whatever the hell you want. They’re gone.”
MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough suggested on “Morning Joe” that Trump’s plan is so confusing the Times can’t even make sense of it. Trump enemy Jorge Ramos wrote in the Washington Post that in an op-ed Thursday that “the fact remains that Trump is still proposing the largest mass deportations in U.S. history.”
Here are some additional tweets criticizing the original article:
https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/771192259798708224
https://twitter.com/jbouie/status/771195626830696448
The @washingtonpost report about Trump's Mexico visit and Arizona speech is true, unlike the one in @nytimes. https://t.co/nXUxNyxr42
— Jamil Smith جميل كريم (@JamilSmith) September 1, 2016
In my job, this would literally be like filing a game story at halftime and going to the bar and then bed.
— Kevin Van Valkenburg (@KVanValkenburg) September 1, 2016