Late to the party: CNN and MSNBC anchors discover there’s a crisis at the border

The worst thing about the border crisis is knowing that nothing will change. It is too valuable a wedge issue for lawmakers to surrender.

The second worst thing about the crisis is knowing that the national press’ outrage and attention will disappear the moment the story ceases to be politically useful. It will be like the Cindy Sheehan episode all over again.

That the immigration crisis is being exploited by lawmakers for political gain has been clear for a while now. That it is also being exploited by members of the press did not become as clear until recently when certain high-profile news anchors flipped from accusing the Trump White House of lying about whether there is a crisis at the border to declaring that there is a crisis at the border and that it is the White House’s fault.

CNN’s Don Lemon, for example, showed a tragic photo Tuesday evening of a Salvadoran father and daughter who drowned trying to cross the Rio Grande.

“For anybody who doesn’t think that immigration is a crisis, a deadly serious crisis, a humanitarian crisis, I got to show you this picture,” said Lemon.

Infuriatingly enough, Lemon is the same host who said on Feb. 14 of the president’s attempt to declare a national emergency to secure border funding, “Here is a really, really disgraceful thing. OK? You listening? All of this, this whole mess, is manufactured. It’s a manufactured crisis. A noncrisis at the border that’s really not fooling anybody. People go, ‘Oh, it’s a crisis, it’s a crisis.’ They know it’s not a crisis. That’s all for political expediency.”

Lemon’s colleague Chris Cuomo also used the word “crisis” this month to describe what is happening at the border. But Cuomo had said on Jan. 11 [emphasis added]: “You can build a physical barrier. But why say it is a cure-all to keep back this demonized group of people, like this marauding horde that doesn’t exist. [Trump] created all of this. It’s all bogus.”

MSNBC’s Brian Williams also led his coverage Tuesday evening by stating that the president is facing a “crisis on the border.” Williams is the same anchor who also accused Trump on Jan. 8 of trying “to sell a crisis that the facts tell us does not exist.”

These reversals are in line with how certain Democratic lawmakers have evolved in how they discuss the border.

In just March of this year, Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic senator from Massachusetts, said on social media: “A fake crisis at the border is fear-mongering of the worst kind—and we’re not falling for it. I voted to terminate the president’s ridiculous ‘national emergency.’”

On Wednesday, she tweeted, “This is a humanitarian crisis, and [Trump] is responsible for it.”

They can claim things changed dramatically between January and now. They can claim there was no border crisis until Trump made one. But it’s a lie. There has been a serious and deadly crisis at the border for going on three decades now. The real journalists covering immigration have tried for years to raise awareness about the assaults, the deaths, the rapes, the human trafficking, the drugs, and the murders inflicted on immigrants crossing illegally into the United States.

Republicans are prone to injecting hyperbole into the immigration debate, but at least they have maintained consistently that there is a crisis.

The news anchors and Democratic lawmakers who are crying foul now, after such curious silence and/or indifference, are doing so because there is a presidential election around the corner. Should a Democrat take the White House in 2020, don’t be surprised if you see the border crisis disappear again from headlines.