Because the press believes President Trump hates immigrants, especially if they’re from South America, everything he says about the subject is interpreted through that prism.
This is one explanation for the national media’s astonishingly irresponsible reporting this week on the president’s remarks at a recent immigration roundtable.
Fresno County Sheriff Margaret Mims complained to the president Wednesday specifically about the difficulties of reporting illegal immigrants who are also members of the notoriously vicious and brutal MS-13 gang.
“There could be an MS-13 gang member that I know about. If they don’t meet a certain threshold, I cannot tell [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] about them,” Mims said Wednesday.
The president responded, “We have people coming into the country or trying to come in, we’re stopping a lot of them, but we’re taking people out of the country. You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people. These are animals.” (Emphasis added.)
It seems pretty obvious what sort of people (or animals) Trump is referring to — MS-13 gang members. But if you can believe it, the national press convinced themselves this week that Trump is the bad guy in this story.
This particular narrative begins with a dishonest framing of the president’s remarks, the typical result of incautious social media sharing. C-SPAN first posted a video to social media showing only Trump’s response to Sims. That video, which omits all context about MS-13, has been viewed by more than 3 million people.
The New York Times reported later that, “Trump lashed out at undocumented immigrants during a White House meeting, calling those trying to breach the country’s borders ‘animals.’”
ABC News went with a tweet that read, “Pres. Trump refers to some who cross the border illegally as ‘animals,’ not people. ‘You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are.’”
CBS News did this: “‘These aren’t people. These are animals.’ President Trump used the harsh rhetoric to describe some undocumented immigrants during a California ‘sanctuary state’ roundtable.”
Trump “calls people trying to get into the country ‘animals’ not people,” NBC News’ chief foreign affairs correspondent Andrea Mitchell said in a tweet that has been shared by nearly 3,000 social media users.
After the more fair-minded among us noted publicly that newsrooms were, in fact, misrepresenting the president’s comments, some in the press actually moved to defend the initial outrage by suggesting their original interpretations were close enough. Others have even pivoted to defending the personhood of MS-13 members (which is fine, I guess, but still ignores that the president’s remarks have been reported out of context).
Media commentators, including the Washington Examiner’s Phil Klein, are right to note that the president has a long history of speaking harshly about immigrants. Hell, Trump’s presidential campaign was launched with a speech that warned Mexico was sending “drug dealers, criminals, rapists.”
There’s a difference, however, between reporting what the president said and reporting what you think he said because you didn’t watch the whole thing.
It’s fine for pundits to analyze the real meaning of Trump’s often freewheeling and, admittedly, confusing remarks. But there’s no excuse for the hard news side of the journalism business getting things so completely wrong.
