Fox News’ Geraldo Rivera on Wednesday repeated the false charge that Attorney General Jeff Sessions referred to illegal immigrants as “filth,” and not a single person on the cable news network corrected the fabrication.
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Sessions said no such thing, the story is a lie, and Fox News is now partly responsible for spreading this fake story.
The attorney general delivered a speech Tuesday to a group of United States border agents. In his address, Sessions struck a tough tone, outlining the different ways in which the Justice Department plans to tackle both illegal immigration and cartel violence.
Sessions referred specifically to the notoriously violent MS-13 and Los Zetas gangs.
The attorney general’s prepared remarks originally called for him to characterize cartel leaders and their practices as “filth.” Sessions ultimately didn’t say this out loud.
For bungling the story by alleging Sessions had characterized all illegal immigrants as “filth,” we have the Wall Street Journal to thank. The paper’s original write-up of Sessions’ speech omitted all necessary context, and it also failed to report that he ultimately didn’t use the word “filth.”
Nevertheless, word soon spread on social media Tuesday that Sessions had used that word to describe all illegal immigrants.
The bogus charge was soon debunked by a few newsrooms, including the Washington Examiner and the Washington Free Beacon, and a few of the people who helped to spread the fabrication eventually issued apologies and retractions.
Rivera and Wednesday’s hosts of Fox’s “Outnumbered” didn’t get the memo.
“I don’t mind the tough talk, because it’s deterred people trying the Southern border, and that’s a good thing because it’s so dangerous for them,” Rivera said in reference to Sessions’ speech. “To stabilize the border is a good thing.”
“But I’m absolutely deeply hurt and offended by the tone of this language. This attorney general by using words like ‘filth’ to describe the undocumented immigrants coming across the Southern border, it smacks of a racist tint to me that I find repulsive,” he added.
Sessions never said that.
Not a single person on Fox’s four-host program challenged Rivera’s assertion. In fact, one host, Eboni Williams, joined him in excoriating the attorney general.
“I’m going to speak from my heart. Hearing it, Geraldo, it sounded a lot like fugitive slave laws to me, quite frankly, that spirit of the harboring and abetting, the hyper-criminalizing of some of this behavior,” she said of Sessions’ outlined plans to crack down on illegal immigration.
Rivera is not alone in alleging Sessions called undocumented immigrants “filth.” He is joined in the spread of this fabrication by the likes of Vox.com’s Matt Yglesias, Foreign Policy’s Molly O’Toole and The New Republic’s Jeet Heer.
