When Republicans and conservatives complain of media bias, they are often brushed aside with a countercharge that they’re retailing a cliché, or else are met with mockery or outright denial. But some bias is so blatant that continued complaints are justified. An especially egregious example is the media’s treatment of immigration, specifically on the present crisis at the southern border and the surge of illegal and unauthorized migration across it.
Few issues have been as controversial under President Trump. Between the rhetoric of “Build The Wall!” and “Abolish ICE!” lies a broad expanse, reflecting huge differences about what the problem is and who is at fault. In place of consensus building, advocates sling epithets and hyperbole at opponents in service to their respective causes. Trump has led the assault on immigration, both legal and illegal, and repeatedly uses sweeping statements to make the case that “rarely have we had such a national emergency.” His opponents fire back with charges of abuse and crimes against humanity, and often fulfill Godwin’s law by suggesting, at lightning speed, that the president and his supporters are tantamount to Nazis.
Meanwhile, news media have made clear their willingness to paint each side with a different brush. The recent controversy over immigrant detainment centers is just the latest example of Republicans being colored as merciless while Democrats are given a pass.
Last month, the Trump administration announced that unaccompanied minors might be housed temporarily at military bases, due to the fact that children are crossing the border faster than the government can process them and find them shelter. The Department of Health and Human Services and the Pentagon notified Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana and Fort Sill Army Base in Oklahoma that they were being considered.
The Missoula Current was one of the first news organizations to report the story and, to its credit, noted that “Fort Sill served as a temporary emergency influx shelter for unaccompanied migrant children in 2014, under the Obama administration.” Other outlets reported the news over the next few weeks, including Time, which ran an article on June 5 entitled, “Shelters Are Overcrowded With Migrant Children. Now the Trump Administration Is Scouting Military Bases.”
A week later, the tone changed, minimizing the Obama-era precedent in favor of something more politically volatile. Time ran a follow-up article on June 11 about Fort Sill being selected to shelter unaccompanied minors temporarily under the headline, “Trump Administration to Hold Migrant Children at Base That Served as WWII Japanese Internment Camp.”
The second paragraph read, “Fort Sill, a 150-year-old installation once used as an internment camp for Japanese-Americans during World War II, has been selected to detain 1,400 children until they can be given to an adult relative, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.”
Not until the fifth paragraph was it noted that the Obama administration also used Fort Sill.
The article lit a fire under the rest of the media. The Associated Press, which had already reported on June 11 about Fort Sill’s selection, followed up the next day with an article under the provocative headline, “Oklahoma base set for migrant site was WWII internment camp.” Dozens of other websites, publications, and networks did much the same, and advocacy groups and politicians repeated the headline uncritically.
Reporting on Obama’s use of “internment camps” five years ago was markedly different. His administration used both Fort Sill and Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio, Texas, which includes another World War II-era internment camp, but a Google search fails to turn up even a single example of a major news report tying Obama’s migrant detainment to “internment camps.” While a handful of articles broached the subject, incarceration of undocumented immigrants in terms of “internment” appears nowhere on the broader media’s radar. Searches of government websites and Twitter accounts, including those of congressmen, likewise come up empty.
Not only did the media miss the “internment camp” connection in 2014, there was scant complaint when media were strictly limited in what they could see and do during a tour of Fort Sill taken that June. Ginnie Graham, an editorial writer for Tulsa World, reported, “Restrictions … included no photography or recording devices, no questions asked of staff, and no interactions with the children.” In contrast, the Trump administration is routinely excoriated for media restrictions and accused of attempting to cover up bad news.
And what about children being kept in “cages”? In 2014, the Nation ran a story on overcrowded detainment facilities holding migrant children, with photos of children behind chain-link fences in warehouses run by the Customs and Border Protection service in Brownsville, Texas, and Nogales, Arizona. This story and most others did not, however, include the word “cages.” The few stories that did so, such as one by a local ABC affiliate headlined “Photos of child immigrants in cages raising alarms,” failed to catch on widely.
But in 2018, Trump critics circulated the 2014 photos on Twitter — some later deleted them — and blasted him for conditions at facilities. The word “cages” began to appear in stories that had previously referred to “chain-link fences” or “holding cells.” Ironically, the president himself may be responsible for spreading “cages” into the present immigration lexicon. He tweeted on May 29, 2018, “Democrats mistakenly tweet 2014 pictures from Obama’s term showing children from the Border in steel cages. They thought it was recent pictures in order to make us look bad, but backfires.” He has tweeted about “cages” twice since then.
Detainment conditions vary from place to place, and change over time, but reporting on them has taken a new tone now that Trump is in the Oval Office. In August 2014, Jim McGovern, a Democratic congressman from Massachusetts, visited McAllen, Texas, to look into poor conditions at border facilities. He spoke of the Customs and Border Protection officers and agents and “their efficient, professional and compassionate performance of their duties.” While McGovern said that “it was heartbreaking to see these kids in small, crowded holding cells,” he did not suggest they were in “cages.”
Similarly, when Nancy Pelosi visited Brownsville in 2014, her words about conditions were anything but harsh. She merely noted that “the facilities just do not meet the need.” Afterward, she made sure to “thank the Border Patrol,” and added, “We think they’re doing the best they can under the circumstances. They have handled this well.” The California Democrat said the “most tragic image I will take home with me — and I wish I could take him too — was the little boy who is infected with a virus and then in isolation all by himself.” But, she added reasonably, “That’s for his safety and the safety of others.”
Rather than call attention to conditions, Pelosi waxed eloquent about the children being detained: “What we just saw was so stunning. If you believe, as we do, that every child, every person, has a spark of divinity in them and is therefore worthy of respect, what we saw in those rooms was dazzling, a sparkling array of God’s children, worthy of respect.”
Fast forward to 2019, and Pelosi’s rhetoric calling on Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen to resign differs significantly. The speaker of the House described the secretary as the “Trump Administration official who put children in cages.”
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez went even further, combining “concentration camps” and “Never again,” clear references to Hitler’s Holocaust. Rather than being ridiculed or corrected, the freshman New York congresswoman was backed up by other Democrats and members of the news media. MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, for example, invoked the use of concentration camps at other points in history to try to mitigate the outrageousness of her statements.
The Obama administration was challenged in that language just once, in a 2014 article headlined, “U.S. Opens New Concentration Camp for Immigrants on Texas-Mexico Border.” The article appeared in the Revolution, which styles itself “The Voice of the Revolutionary Communist Party USA.” Democrats and the mass media took no notice.
Trump has arguably taken a bad situation left by Obama and made it worse. Obama’s equivocation, inaction, and tacit invitation via the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, encouraging children to make the dangerous trek to America, exacerbated a problem that has festered for decades. Trump’s incendiary rhetoric, hostility toward even legal immigration, and use of executive authority, for which he excoriated Obama, has further poisoned debate. But rather than reporting fairly, news media have sided with Democrats and deepened the divide.
Distorting or concealing the facts is a journalistic disservice to a public. Only Democrats fighting a Republican administration benefit when “fences” are suddenly called “cages,” and “detainment facilities” are rebranded “internment camps” or “concentration camps.” Today’s media and Democrats should learn from one of their own. Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan noted long ago that people were entitled to their opinions but not to their own facts. He did not say it depended on which party was in the White House.
Jeryl Bier is an accountant and freelance writer.
