The Washington Post disgraced itself again, this time by making up a quote by U.S. United Nations Ambassador Nikki Haley, and after getting called out about it, promising to correct it ... and then, not correcting it, at least, not until Haley had to get after them to keep their promises, just as their mothers must have had to get them to make their beds.

U.N. Ambassador Nikki Haley demanded on Saturday that a Washington Post reporter “retract” his claim that she said there were 250,000 U.S. citizens living in poverty. Policy reporter Jeff Stein and race and economics reporter Tracy Jan wrote a story titled “The Trump administration has a new argument for dismantling the social safety net: It worked” on Friday. Stein tweeted the 250,000 figure that Haley says she “never said” with a link to his story on Friday.

That's from the Daily Caller, which did its best to sort out the mess.

Turns out it was the United Nations that made the 250,000 quote, not Haley, and the 250,000 was a figure for extreme poverty, not regular poverty. Neither the 'extreme,' nor the fact that Haley never said it at all, were gottten right in the original story, quite a two-fer for two reporters to make on the mistake front. And they ran the bad quote with Haley's picture on their tweet.

Stein botched his first correction this way, according to the Daily Caller:

“The Haley number above, I should note, is for ‘extreme poverty,'” he tweeted less than 10 minutes later on Friday, without deleting the incorrect tweet. The incorrect tweet received 299 retweets. The correction tweet received eight. It is unclear whether the Washington Post story contained the incorrect number in Stein’s tweet. A photo of Haley speaking is the photo that appears in social media links to the story.

Umm, except that it wasn't any "Haley number," as he put it. It was the United Nations' number. He didn't get to that.

So Haley was made to come over there one more time, tweeting this:

Unfortunate when a reporter doesn’t follow through and I have to do this:@JStein_WaPo I never said this. My team has asked you to retract this and take down your tweets. I am now respectfully asking that you follow through with what you told my team you would do. Thank you. — Nikki Haley (@nikkihaley) July 14, 2018



Rather than make the correction, let alone apologize (Millennials of this stripe never apologize), Stein on his twitter feed announced that he was deleting his tweets, so no one would see how mistake-prone he had been. He finally added that it was the UN, not Haley, who said this:

I’ve deleted earlier tweets indicating that Nikki Haley, U.S. Ambassador to the U.N., had said only 250,000 Americans are in “extreme poverty.” The U.S. Permanent Mission to the United Nations and International Organizations in Geneva had said this. — Jeff Stein (@JStein_WaPo) July 14, 2018

Jan, meanwhile, just retweeted the bad story with the late-to-add correction at the bottom, not exactly a candid admission of wrongdoing, and Stein retweeted that, too:

The White House has declared the War on Poverty “largely over and a success." Except it's not. w/@JStein_WaPo https://t.co/AMrHU5zr1f — Tracy Jan (@TracyJan) July 13, 2018

Cripes, what a bunch of childish craven cowards. Instead of just making the correction and getting it over with, these two Millennials decided to drag it out, leadenly playing passive-aggressive, pretending nothing bad was going on. In stalling, they had hoped the whole thing would vanish down the memory hole and they could go on about their business of making up quotes.

Their double-dipping mistake was a reflection of their political bias, which suggests they aren't that interested in reporting the news, they're just interested in using the news as their activism platform. Seriously, taking out 'extreme' and saying Nikki Haley was claiming there were only 250,000 poor people in America - wouldn't that make her look out of touch on poverty in America, which just happens to be a top Democratic talking point for the midterms? And using a United Nations number and putting it in Haley's mouth - how does anyone make that kind of mistake legitimately? You'd have to be a Democratic operative to go that route and well, draw your own conclusions.

It's no surprise, the writer in question, Jeff Stein, is a previous employee of Vox, the Obama-hipster news outfit founded by Ezra Klein, whose excesses are why we got Trump. Klein, remember, was the founder of JournoList, the secret media listserv among major media and Obama operatives that together set the Obama 'narrative' in the echo chamber press. Yecch.

Stein's bio says he was one of their writers, meaning he learned at Ezra's knee, before he moved on to the Washington Post. His sidekick (it actually took two of them to make mistakes this big) is Tracy Jan, another leftist of the more conventional sort.

And between them, neither saw fit to make the correction they had promised to make, until Haley had to call on them to do what they promised a second time. This is childish, and spoiled, the activity of someone who's always been told how great he was and whose bedroom walls are probably full of everyone-a-winner participation medals. In short, this was a pajama boy and his sidekick. JournoList indeed, we can see Klein's handprints all over this.

Any questions as to why the public cannot stand the press?