OPINION:
The national media are hopelessly in the grip of leftist ideology and culture.
If you need further proof, you only have to look at how two recent stories on illegal immigration played out in the news. The different ways the media approached them were as much an indicator of their bias as anything else could be.
The first occurred last week at the White House, where President Trump’s communications team decorated the lawn with posters featuring the mug shots of 101 illegal aliens, all of whom had been charged with additional, often violent crimes. The posters described the alleged crimes committed and then displayed the information that the aliens depicted had been arrested by immigration authorities.
That was bad enough for our horrified media, but what they really couldn’t stomach was that the White House staff had placed the posters directly behind the location where all the television networks do their live hits. That was just too much for MSNBC.
“The White House has put up about 100 posters of what they say are unauthorized immigrants who have been arrested for violent crimes,” intoned host Jonathan Lemire. “No matter what network you’re on, that includes MSNBC, if you’re doing a hit from the White House right now, those pictures will be behind you.”
His guest, Maria Teresa Kumar, the CEO of the leftist political organization Voto Latino, was visibly shaken.
“Having that representation of those pictures in the background, we can’t allow that to basically, for us to carry the water of potentially innocent people,” she said, and then called for television networks to obscure the faces in the posters. “I recognize a lot of shots are tough, but I encourage folks to actually make sure that those shots are blurred to the best of your abilities.”
Indeed, MSNBC fuzzed out the faces on the posters, as did CNN on its broadcasts.
Forgetting for a second that news organizations routinely publish mug shots of accused criminals before their trials, the handling of this story also reveals that the media have placed themselves in the role of defense attorney for the illegal aliens. Journalists are attempting to protect the identities of people who broke the law to enter this country, and then broke the law some more while they were here. This shows, beyond any question at all, that the media have taken up the position of advocate for this group of known lawbreakers, who have many violent criminals among them.
Compare that to a story and accompanying photograph two days later from Reuters, which flew a drone over the Bluebonnet detention center in Anson, Texas, because dozens of illegal aliens from Venezuela were being held there. The detainees had somehow learned that Reuters was taking their picture from above. It was fortuitous because the prisoners, accused members of the notorious Tren de Aragua gang, wanted to deliver a message to the outside world.
Standing in a courtyard, they arranged themselves to spell out “S-O-S” with their bodies, trusting that the news media would act as their messenger and help them with the public relations effort, which Reuters did most happily.
You see, the illegal alien gang members didn’t want to be sent to an equally notorious prison in El Salvador, which is a coincidence because Reuters didn’t want them sent there, either. Reuters didn’t mind showing it by publishing that picture.
That’s today’s media: fuzzing out the faces of illegal aliens when it protects them, but openly showing them standing in a prison yard when they think it helps.
Hey, no one ever said their bias wasn’t versatile.
You can see a pattern emerge again, as the media have settled in for their long fight against Mr. Trump in his second term.
Combating illegal immigration has been one of the president’s key strengths, according to every poll conducted of his presidency, which is why the media want to weaken him there. So they run story after story, shaded like the two situations described above, in ways designed to peel points off the president’s approval numbers on the topic of illegal immigration. Once the media are confident they have published a sufficient number of negative stories, they conduct a poll using negatively framed questions based on their own negative reporting and then loudly broadcast the predictably negative results.
What’s inescapable is that in many of these polls, hardly any Trump voters say they now regret voting for him in November, and that says clearly that the people who elected him are happy with what he’s doing.
The media can’t stand it that way, so they become activists, because that’s what you do when you’re hopelessly in the grip of the extreme left.
• Tim Murtaugh is a Washington Times columnist and founder of Line Drive Public Affairs. He served as a senior adviser on the 2024 Trump campaign and as communications director on the 2020 Trump campaign.
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