On Sunday, 60 Minutes profiled Moussa Diawara, a deported Texas father of two. The segment sympathetically claimed he feared returning to Mali partly because he had converted to Christianity. It told viewers the Department of Homeland Security questioned his credibility, yet it never mentioned that his 2012 immigration application claimed he was gay and feared persecution for it. A DHS spokesperson told the New York Post that CBS learned of the claim two weeks before airtime. CBS didn’t immediately respond to the outlet.
I wasn’t in that control room, and Diawara may have a perfectly good explanation. Big media outlets seldom need to invent a fact. A splice, a headline, or a missing paragraph builds the narrative for them. I’m a husband, a father of three sons and a lifetime observer of the manipulations of the mainstream media.
