CNN’s Brianna Keilar is a habitual practitioner of cheap-shot screeds against conservatives, but her Aug. 8 report on illegal immigration (and a subsequent tweet) outstripped her own usual level of character assassination — especially against former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
“President Biden has a border crisis on his hands – no doubt,” she tweeted on Aug 9. “But conservatives are capitalizing on it by demonizing immigrants as diseased spreaders of covid – with no facts to back that up. #RollTheTape.” Included was a nine-minute segment from her CNN report from the day before.
As my colleague Tiana Lowe convincingly explained on Aug. 9, the tweet was bad enough. No facts? Then why did CBS This Morning, hardly a conservative program, run a lengthy segment on Aug. 10 with the chyron explicitly saying “COVID Crisis at the Border?” Mayor Javier Villalobos of McAllen, Texas, said far too many coronavirus-infected illegal immigrants are “going out” into his community, “and we have no authority to stop it.”
As Axios reported on July 27, “About 50,000 migrants who crossed the southern border illegally have now been released in the United States without a court date. Although they are told to report to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office instead, just 13% have shown up so far.” And “it’s unprecedented for agents to release migrants without an official notice to appear in court.”
On the same day came another report that illegal immigrants who show symptoms of COVID-19 and said they had tested positive were found staying in local hotel rooms in southern Texas and eating at a Whataburger restaurant after being released from federal custody. And NBC reported on Aug. 7 that more than 18% of newly entered migrant families “tested positive for Covid on leaving Border Patrol custody over the past two to three weeks.”
Yes, Ms. Keilar, those are “facts.”
Still, what was far, far worse than her misstatement of facts was how she outlandishly vilified Gingrich. She ran a clip of Gingrich making a rather basic argument (albeit in his characteristic provocative style) that a key reason to oppose rampant illegal immigration is that those who enter without formal processes tend to “know nothing of American history, nothing of American tradition, nothing of the rule of law.”
This is an entirely legitimate expression of concern for common culture and national sovereignty. To Keilar, though, Gingrich was “echoing the tone of far-right extremists.” Worse, she didn’t stop with that vague allegation. Although Gingrich said not a word about race, much less faith, Keilar said his words came “awfully close to what’s known as the ‘great replacement theory,’ the theory that white people are being replaced by nonwhite people” as part of a “conspiracy” by Jews. (Note: Gingrich is famously friendly to Jews and to Israel, not hostile to them.)
Then came the worst, a calumny so inexcusable that Gingrich may think it approaches the legal definition of defamation. As frightening video ran on-screen, Keilar directly likened Gingrich’s comments to the white supremacist marchers who desecrated Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, and to mass murderers in Pittsburgh in 2018 and El Paso in 2019.
Yeah, that’s right: Gingrich is a fellow traveler with mass murderers. And, she said, Gingrich’s words are all part of a rash of “incendiary rhetoric from the Right.” Conservatives, she said, “are the vectors here, infecting Americans they profess to care about with misinformation.”
Remember, CNN presents Keilar as a midday “news” host, not an opinion-monger — much less a vicious smear merchant.
Journalistic ethics matter. For her carefully planned mass-murderer references alone, CNN should suspend Keilar from the air. Some rhetoric is too “incendiary” to go unpunished.
