If it weren’t for double-standards, the mainstream media would have no standards at all.
Blinded by their own far-left political agenda, the American media are completely distorting news coverage of both the challenge posed by rampant illegal immigration and President Trump’s prudent policies to address it.
Trump is doing exactly what other presidents have done when it comes to securing the border, yet the media are treating him much differently.
The New York Times, to give one example, ran a headline blaring that “Photo of Children Fleeing Tear Gas at Border in Mexico Sparks Anger,” yet nowhere in the article did it mention that President Obama did the very same thing.
In 2013, a group of nearly 100 people trying to illegally enter the United States threw rocks and bottles at U.S. Border Patrol agents, who responded by using tear gas and pepper spray.
Indeed, the Border Patrol used tear gas at a rate of more than once per month in some years during the Obama administration, and pepper spray has been deployed more than 500 times since 2012, peaking at 151 incidents in 2013.
The media, however, would have you think that President Trump is the only president ever to use countermeasures at the border. They never explain to the American people that this is standard policy practiced by presidents from both parties.
That’s because the media want open borders just as much as the Democrats do. If they truly cared about children and families, they would support prudent measures for the lawful and organized entry of asylum seekers and other legal acts by migrants.
The game of charades they play reveals the feigned feelings they have for the migrants. Their most important goal is to marginalize the president, and they are willing to play politics with a very important issue to do so.
Much to their frustration, though, Trump doesn’t just sit around and let the media lie about his policies. He sent out two tweets over the weekend hitting back at them.
“@60Minutes did a phony story about child separation when they know we had the exact same policy as the Obama Administration,” he wrote. “In fact, a picture of children in jails was used by other Fake Media to show how bad (cruel) we are, but it was in 2014 during [Obama] years.”
“Obama separated children from parents, as did Bush etc., because that is the policy and law. I tried to keep them together but the problem is, when you do that, vast numbers of additional people storm the Border,” the president explained. “So with Obama separation is fine, but with Trump, it’s not. Fake 60 Minutes!”
Trump continues to push for funding of the border wall, knowing that preventing illegal immigration in the first place is the only effective and humane solution.
Unlike most establishment politicians in Washington, he’s proven that he can be flexible on the issue of immigration, giving Democrats a chance to score a major policy victory if they’re willing to meet him halfway.
In February, Trump offered the Democrats continued waivers for around 1.8 DACA recipients in return for border wall funding and other changes to our immigration laws. They obstinately refused the generous deal and carried on with business as usual — obstructing the President’s every attempt to secure our southern border and fix our broken immigration system.
Faced with uncompromising Democrat obstruction and a lying mainstream media, Trump has no other option than to fight back. The determination of the Democrat-media complex to push a pro-open borders narrative at the expense of the truth proves that the President is justified in his condemnation of fake news.
The media don’t care about what’s good or bad for America, they only care about undermining Trump and advancing their own radical leftist agenda.
We know that many of the migrants in the “caravan” camped at our border are criminals fleeing justice in their own country, including one who is wanted for attempted murder, yet the media fixate on stories about women and children seeking refuge without even acknowledging the hardened criminals camped alongside them.
Illegal immigration isn’t a good thing for anybody. It sends children on a desperate march through the desert, during which many fall victim to human traffickers or suffer abuse at the hands of those hired to escort them.
Trump is doing the right thing by standing up to the mainstream media and fighting for the security of the American people.
No matter how much they try to distort the truth, the media have a fact checker in the White House who believes in securing our border and protecting our citizens. That’s created a whole new standard for today’s news media that they will no doubt fail to adopt.
Derryck Green is a faculty member at Prager University and a member of the National Center for Public Policy Research’s Project 21, a national leadership network of black conservatives.