Mistakes happen. The press makes them. Government makes them. I make them, too, and so do you. What’s often more revealing about character, however, is what comes after the error is brought to light.

And on that score, the two people whom Americans are paying to speak on behalf of their president — presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway and press secretary Sean Spicer — have revealed themselves to be fundamentally ill-suited for the job.

They aren’t honest, which is a problem because they make our president dishonest. Worse still, when they speak for the president, they are often speaking for the country — and in that way they can make liars of us all.

Last Thursday night, Conway was on “Hardball with Chris Matthews.” She defended President Donald Trump’s controversial travel ban on seven majority-Muslim nations, including Iraq. She seemed to say that folks wouldn’t be so upset about it if the press hadn’t kept Americans in the dark about the “Bowling Green massacre” committed by two Iraqis in 2011.

Except as she knew perfectly well, the press covered the 2011 events she was referring to with vigor.

What did happen were the arrests of two Iraqis who admitted they had been planning to send weapons and money to the Middle East for use by terrorists fighting U.S. soldiers. The two also admitted that previously, while living in Iraq, they had used IEDs against our soldiers. These men — clearly our enemies — were sentenced to prison.

But as I said earlier, mistakes happen. So why keep harping on hers? Because what reveals her as a dishonest surrogate for the president is the way she responded to her mistakes once they were well-known.

Whatever happened to the simple and speedy retraction? Twitter makes it so easy. “Hey there! I was totally wrong about the Bowling Green events. They were bad guys, but to be clear: There was no attack in Bowling Green.”

Conway also tried to shift from blaming someone else for her mistake to taking credit for doing it in a way that was so classy. And what’s wrong with that? Nothing, except, deep breath now — it’s not classy or graceful. It’s not even honest.

A Time reporter covering Trump’s first day in office made a mistake. Noting other changes in decor, he looked for the bust of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in the Oval Office and didn’t see it. He added a one-line note about the missing bust to a report sent to hundreds of White House reporters at 7:31 p.m. Friday. People started asking about it right away, and he spent the next 30 minutes trying to get a staffer to confirm whether the bust was in the office.

By 8 p.m., he had learned he was wrong. He sent a correction within two minutes to the White House press corps, then spent the rest of the evening sending no less than 12 tweets taking responsibility for the error, correcting it and apologizing.

Far from letting “class” or “grace” guide their reaction, the White House has savaged the reporter for the error over the past two weeks.

“Some members of the media were engaged in deliberately false reporting,” Spicer fumed at an extraordinary news conference on the evening of Trump’s first full day in office.

“After it was pointed out that this was just plain wrong, the reporter casually reported and tweeted out and tried to claim that a Secret Service agent must have just been standing in front of it. This was irresponsible and reckless.”

To call Zeke Miller’s mistake irresponsible or reckless is one thing. But to call it “deliberately false” is slander. And more to the point, it’s plainly dishonest.

Thirty-six hours after his tongue-lashing performance before the press corps, Spicer took questions in his first official White House news conference. When asked bluntly by an ABC reporter whether he intended to tell the truth from the podium, Spicer demurred. As much as possible, he said.

“If we make a mistake, we’ll do our best to correct it. But. it is a two-way street. There are many mistakes that the media makes all the time. They misreport something, they don’t report something, they get a fact wrong. I don’t think that’s always — you know, to turn around and say, OK, ‘you were intentionally lying.’”

Well, right. Except 36 hours before, that’s precisely what he did say.

So when Conway defends her own error by explaining that everyone else gets stuff wrong, too, and cites as an example a story that “almost” published and Miller’s mistake two weeks ago, she’s just reminding everyone not to take her at face value.

That wouldn’t matter, not even a little, but she’s being paid by the American people to work for our president.

Michael A. Lindenberger is a columnist for The Dallas Morning News.