CNN
New Day
April 2, 2018
7:07 a.m. Eastern
PETE HEGSETH, FOX NEWS ANCHOR (from Fox and Friends): What do you think? There's a small migrant army marching towards the United States -- peacefully. It wants to cross our borders. How should it be handled?
JIM SCIUTTO, FILL-IN CO-HOST: A migrant "army." Listen to that phrasing -- this is an "army." It speaks to an invasion of brown people, right? From Central America. This is the implication.
(...)
New Day
October 19
6:12 a.m.
JOHN BERMAN: One of the things that's interesting -- those statistics are very interesting because the record number has to do with the number of family units crossing the border. So how people are crossing the border has fundamentally changed. Apparently now they're coming in greater numbers as families.
ALISYN CAMEROTA: Or with children. I mean, the President would say they know they need to bring a child -- I mean, that's what he's telling us today -- they know they need to bring a child in order to get across the border, and it may not even be their own child.
BERMAN: The point I want to make is if you look at this chart -- and I'm trying to have this built so you can see it bigger -- but look at all this. This is 2000 -- this is how many illegal border crossings there were in the year 2000. Down here is roughly now. so you're still at historic lows in terms of the numbers of people crossing the border. It's just now they're coming more as families. It's up a little bit from last year, but it's still way lower.
CAMEROTA: Agreed -- that's important context, but it can't go up at all for President Trump.
BERMAN: But what I'm trying to say is, this is -- the administration is trying trying to use these increases in certain types of crossings to spike fear.
(...)
Reliable Sources
October 21
11:17 a.m.
BRIAN STELTER: These pictures from the Guatemala-Mexico border certainly are powerful. Right now, some of the migrants are entering into Mexico -- the government's trying to stop them from moving north toward the U.S. How do you see these pictures being weaponized right now?
DARA LIND, VOX SENIOR REPORTER: I mean, they're very gripping pictures, and, more than that, the image of a mass of people moving through, crossing bridges and rivers indicates -- it feels like an invading force. Of course, what a picture doesn't do -- or a clip -- is show you where it is, how far that might be from the U.S. -- so when you have people talking about a border crisis and not specifying that it's the Mexico-Guatemala border which is several weeks walking from the U.S. -- it makes it feel like there's this mass of human beings that, you know, the imagery over and over again of thousands of people surging forward in something like a segment like this where you're playing clips alongside people talking -- is going to make people feel like they're under siege.
STELTER: Yeah, it feels like very urgent -- well, certainly, it's being portrayed as a very urgent threat on Fox's pro-Trump talk shows when, in fact, it is happening very, very far away from the U.S. border.
(...)
MAX BOOT, CNN ANALYST: When you show the video, it's easy for these voices of fearmongering on the right to say, "Oh, look at this, isn't this threatening? All these people," when, in fact, a lot of them are women and children. They're mainly people looking for work and safety trying to flee from oppression..."
(...)
New Day
October 22
7:24 a.am.
MATT SCHLAPP, AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE UNION: If you come to the border today with a child -- it doesn't even have to be your own child -- you will get entrance into our country -- you will jump the line in front of immigrants in this country -- family members who are waiting in line--
CAMEROTA: And will you get -- just to fact check it -- will you get a luxury car?
SCHLAPP: What did you say?
CAMEROTA: Will you get a luxury car given to you?
SCHLAPP: You get all kinds of -- what the Democrats want to do in every one of these things is
CAMEROTA: Matt, will you get a luxury car?
SCHLAPP: You get ObamaCare, you get a telephone, you get all kinds of things. I don't know about a car -- I haven't heard about a car, but, I mean, you get all kinds of programs.
CAMEROTA: Matt, you don't get a Rolls Royce -- you don't get a luxury car -- George Soros doesn't meet your at the border handing out millions of dollars.
(...)
8:43 a.m.
JOHN AVLON: This is just more play-to-the-base panic, rooted in fear and anger rather than any reality that these asylum seekers are going to rush the border.
(...)
October 23
6:03 a.m.
ABBY PHILLIP: The migrants are more than 1,000 miles from America's border with Mexico, and the individuals who have spoken to CNN -- largely women and children -- say they are fleeing violence and poverty in their home countries.
(...)
7:01 a.m.
CAMEROTA: The President is insisting without a shred of evidence or facts that there are dangerous people embedded among the migrants.
(...)
7:30 a.m.
SUSAN GLASSER, CNN GLOBAL AFFAIRS ANALYST: We're talking about an immigration crisis that arguable does not exist, according to experts.
(...)
7:40 a.m.
BILL WEIR: Twenty years ago, the Border Patrol was arresting north of a million people a year -- now, it's a third of that. Yes, arrests have spiked in the three months since family separations ended in the summer there, but this is economics. I mean, if the minimum wage in Canada was $100 an hour, how many of us would be swimming, you know, from Detroit to Windsor, right? So there's nothing new about this. The only thing that makes this such a sizzling story is the timing of it, right? And what's interesting is, a lot of the Hondurans who left Honduras did so because the President there -- supported by Donald Trump -- won a very contested election and then turned into a strongman and started cracking down on opposition.
(...)
October 24
6:09 a.m.
CAMEROTA: They're thousands of miles away from our U.S. border. If they're traveling at 20 miles a day on average, it will take months at that pace to get to the U.S. border. This actually is not a problem.
(...)
BERMAN: Just one last point on the facts here, which is the President trying to create the notion that this is a crisis, and I'll just hold up my favorite chart, which is the immigration chart ... but you can see the trends here. You can see it. This is 2000 -- that's how many illegal border crossing arrests there were in 2000, and then, way down at the bottom, is where we are today. It's historically low here.
(...)
CAMEROTA: The last caravan that came in, we have it, CNN reported, the last caravan that came when there was all the hue and cry about that, three people from that caravan were granted asylum.
(...)
ALICE STEWART, CNN CONTRIBUTOR: Just last year alone, Customs and Border Patrol agents process 94,000 of these people once they come into this country. Many of them didn't qualify to seek asylum, but once they were here, due to the Democrat-backed policies of "catch and release," once they're here, if they decide not to come back to court, they don't have to. And of those 94,000 that came here, 99 percent of them are still in this country. So I think we have to look at the fact that, once they get here, they are free to stay in this country and disappear, if you will, due to the catch and release policies of the Democrats, and that's the concern.
CAMEROTA: We don't have all those -- Alice, I'm not doubting you -- we don't have all those stats at our fingertips. What we have heard from the immigration folks is the vast majority do show up for their court cases because they do want to be able to stay here legally and go through the process of becoming asylum seekers or citizens. So that is a meme that is not true that they just vanish into the night. That's not what the vast majority of them do.
(...)
7:07 a.m.
BERMAN: There are those thousands of migrants who are a thousand miles away plus from the United States. They're not demanding to be let in -- they're coming to apply for asylum.
(...)
7:46 a.m.
PATRICK OPPMANN, CNN CORRESPONDENT (reporting from Mexico): The Trump administration is pressuring the Mexican government to deport more than 7,000 members of this migrant caravan back home because they say there could be terrorists or dangerous gang members in their midst. But literally everyone we have talked to here says the exact opposite -- they're not gang members, they're their victims.
(...)
October 26
6:28 a.m.
BERMAN: And I will just note again, if you're going to call this a national emergency, this number down here is the number of arrests at the border in in 2018, near the historic low -- it's at 396,000 right now -- it was less last year, but this is not a high number, especially when you consider in 2000 it was 1.6 million. And that's what the President is now going to declare a national emergency.
(...)
November 1
6:13 a.m.
CAMEROTA: The number is now is around 5,000. If they ever even make it the 1,000 miles to the voter. And so do you even need that level of resources?
(...)
JOHN AVLON: Can you have an active emergency that accounts for the deployment of U.S. troops when the migrants are 1,000 miles away? And if so, how come we didn't see anything resembling this level of troop deployments at, say, Hurricane Maria, a real emergency on American soil.
BERMAN: Okay, can I pull out my chart? And also, if you look at the chart here of arrests and illegal border crossings, you know, we'd have to put 15,000 troops here in 2000 when 1.6 million people were coming over the border. We are near a historic low right now with illegal border crossings.
(...)
November 2
6:09 a.m.
CAMEROTA: They say -- its just hard to know what's true in here, okay? So one of the things they say is over 270 individuals along the caravan route have criminal histories, including know gang membership. But, Abby, they give no source for how they know this. That's an awfully specific number, but they don't say where they came up with this -- who is telling them this. And the reason that they have lost the authority, I think, for us to believe them is because Kirstjen Nielsen -- the head of Homeland Security -- said something like this on June 17: "We do not have a policy of separating families at the border, period." That was what she tweeted out on June 17, so, you know, millions of people and their own lying eyes, were told that they were wrong. So when they put out this so-called "fact sheet," it doesn't ring necessarily true to people.
(...)
8:03 a.m.
CAMEROTA: They say in it, "270 individuals in the caravan route have known gang histories." They give no source. We don't know how they would know that, but we have journalists embedded with them and know that there are lots of mothers and children who are coming and fleeing. And here's why it is hard to believe them. The Department of Homeland Security -- Kirstjen Nielsen -- told us June 17, "We do not have a policy of separating families at the border, period." That was not true.
ANA NAVARRO, CNN CONTRIBUTOR: Let's just stop saying things were not true. Let's just call them bald-faced lies. They lie.
(...)
BERMAN: And there are some things that are just provably false -- many things provably false with what he said that are lies. He said that only three percent of people who are asylum seekers --
CAMEROTA: -- asylum seekers show back up. It's actually 89 percent show back up.
(...)
November 3
6:10 a.m.
ERROL LOUIS, CNN POLITICAL COMMENTATOR: And so the President and the White House and the Republican strategists are saying we've got to gin up a lot of fear and a lot of energy around this migrant caravan that's still two months away -- desperate people walking on foot who might get here around Christmas time or something.
November 6
1. washpost
2. nat review
3. wash examiner
4. cis1 study
5. cis2 factcheck
6. cis 2017 some studies are misleading because combine those are free with those who are incarcerated and unable escape -- and the herald cites and examiner cites
7. case management more expensive, and focus on selective number
8. sept 2018 cis debunk study
9. jan 2019 43 pct dont show up
10. wall st absentia confusing
11. many asylum seekers never apply
12. sessions stats
13. credible hearing
14. removal proceedings
15. first caravan april asylum ***
16. publicized and called themselves
17.detention facilities
18. dna cases
19. cases
20. cases
21. net
22. deport reasons
23. stats
24. stats
highly misleading and failed to shed light on the critical issues like the large percentage who never apply for asylum or who have their cases rejected, and who then cannot be easily removed from the country
[camerota claims legal to cross border and apply for asylum]
November 6
7:57 a.m.
JOHN AVLON: Illegal crossings across the Southern border have been basically declining since 2000.
(...)
November 26
6:00 a.m.
JOHN BERMAN: U.S. Border Patrol agents deployed teargas on Central Americans seeking asylum -- this includes women and children -- during an incident near one of the world's busiest border crossings. Mexico says 39 people were arrested after a peaceful march devolved into chaos. Some 500 migrants rushed the border from the Mexican side in Tijuana, overwhelming police blockades.
(...)
7:00 a.m.
CAMEROTA: U.S. Border Patrol agents used teargas on Central Americans seeking asylum, including women and children, in an incident near one of the world's busiest border crossings. Mexico says 39 people were arrested after peaceful protests devolved into chaos. Officials say many migrants rushed the Mexican side in Tijuana, overwhelming police blockades and forcing a border shutdown. ...
BERMAN: So, moments ago, President Trump threatened to shut down the border permanently if this incident or ones like it continue He also used this incident to argue for his border wall, although it's hard to see what difference a wall would have made in this situation.
(...)
MIGUEL MARQUEZ: They went under that car bridge, overwhelming several Mexican police barricades, and then up toward several areas of the border. That's when members of the Customs and Border Patrol fired teargas cannisters and pepper balls -- or pepper bullets -- at them. Many of these individuals were women, children, some men. CPB says they were also throwing projectiles at some of their officers as well.
(...)
CAMEROTA: As unfortunate as this incident is, I'm not sure that it proves that we need a border wall. In fact, it's the opposite. The border worked. Border security worked. So however many people rushed the border -- 39 were arrested, they are going to be deported -- no one reached the border. So shutting down the border worked. And it also proves that we don't need a -- I think -- a border wall because the migrants made an effort -- they went out of their way to go to the Tijuana entrance because the rest of the border was considered to hazardous, to dangerous to cross, so they went an extra hundreds of miles to the port of entry of Tijuana because they considered that the easiest. So, in other words, the system is actually working.
(...)
January 2, 2019
7:30 a.m.
LEYLA SANTIAGO: Immigration advocates will tell you this is a result of the Trump administration's policies -- asylum seekers being turned away at the port of entry when they try to go in to say, "I'm here to seek asylum," fleeing poverty and violence. Even so, an HHS internal report last year said that such a practice would encourage illegal immigration. So immigration advocates are pointing to this incident as yet another proving that the Trump administration policy is not working at the port of entries.
(...)
January 8, 2019
6:25 a.m.
BERMAN: The President ran a campaign on this recently and lost. He created this caravan notion -- this idea that the nation was being invaded because he thought it was drive Republicans to electoral victory.
(...)
Fox and Friends Sunday
April 1, 2018
9:09 a.m.
BRANDON JUDD, BORDER PATROL COUNCIL: When they cross the border illegally, the reason they openly do it is because they know that the "catch and release" program continues today. When we catch them, we'll take them to -- we'll arrest them and take them into custody -- we'll take them back to our stations, we'll process them, and we'll set them up for deportation proceedings. But they'll never see those deportation proceedings because what happens is, we'll transfer them over to the custody of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement -- which is ICE -- they'll then process them, and they'll release them with a notice to appear in which they're supposed to present themselves before an immigration judge about two years from now, but they never show up for their deportation proceedings.
DREW GRIFFIN: I think what most people watching this story are thinking is: Why can't you just stop them from entering in the first place because it's against the law?
JUDD: Because once they enter the country -- so even if we're standing -- even if we're standing at the border with out hands up saying, "Don't enter -- don't enter," all they have to do is cross one foot into the border and we have to then take them into custody. And if they ask for asylum or they say, "I fear to go back to my country," then we have to process them under that quote, unquote, "credible fear," which then allows them to be released into our country.
April 2
6:02 a.m.
AINSLEY EARHARDT: The "catch and release" program is unbelievable because once they step foot -- you've got 1,100 or 1,200 people walking up to step foot into the United States -- once they put one foot on our soil, we have to take them into custody -- we have to listen to their reason why they want to want to come in...
(...)
DOOCY: They asked the caravan members if they were trying to take advantage of DACA -- they said, "Ma'am, we don't think we would actually qualify."
(...)
April 3
7:17 a.m.
STEVE DOOCY: A caravan of about 1,200 Latin American migrants have completed about a quarter of the 1,900-mile journey across Mexico. ... They've had these marches before, but we've not highlighted them because they haven't been really public.
(...)
April 28
7:16 a.m.
JUDD: These individuals are hoping that we're going to continue with the "catch and release" policy, that we're going to release them, and then they're just going to show up to their court date which is going to be about two years from now, which is ridiculous
(...)
April 29
7:07 a.m.
ABBY HUNTSMAN: I was talking to some friends yesterday about this, and a number of them asked the question, "Well, if they go through Mexico first, why don't they seek asylum in Mexico before they come to the United States?
PETE HEGSETH: Most of them already did. Most of them were already granted some level of asylum in Mexico, but their goal is not Mexico -- their goal was the United States.
(...)
8:12 a.m.
CUETO: There's really no way to see their true criminal record in the country of origin. So we don't know the record or what criminal record they have in the country that they're coming from.
(...)
as someone who has intensely scrutinized media and, specifically, Fox, what was the most revealing anecdote you feel that you exposed in the book that would maybe even surprised you about either the depth of how they tolerate misinformation or, you know, the lack of backbone on the part of Murdoch and shareholders at Fox? What surprised you the most?
BRIAN STELTER: Well, there's a level of cynicism that I was not prepared for because, as someone who works at CNN -- of course another cable news channel -- I work with people that take their jobs really seriously and care deeply about what they do. Obviously, we make mistakes, and we're held accountable for those mistakes, and that's the way it should be. But at least there's an effort to get to the truth and report as accurately as we can.
Now, compare that to Fox and Friends, which is a really, really important show because it informs and misinforms the President on a daily basis. And at Fox and Friends, you have words in the banner -- sometimes inaccurate words -- going straight to the President's head and then his Twitter feed and then all of our feeds and all the way around the world, and there's not a set of checks and balances. There's not a sense of "You must uphold journalistic integrity," and Fox and Friends producers admit all of this to me, confessional style, and I quote them in the book at length saying things like this, they would say, "We're not practicing what we preach -- we're telling other people to believe this stuff, but we don't believe it ourselves." I had one of the Fox hosts say to me that we started a program for Trump -- we started to make programming choices based on the fact that he was watching. That is something that is new in American media. We didn't have this between MSNBC and Barack Obama or between NBC and George Bush. This is new -- this is different-- and because so much of the information is low quality or completely untrue, it affects all of us, even if you or I never watch Fox, we are still affected because the President is misled, and this is true whether
(...)
HEFFNER: And during the '16 campaign, there was that attempt to parse words, you know, but let's interpret his intent, not what the words actually say. And I think the problem with that, Brian, was those who were so accustomed to talking points on TV forgot that really rhetoric is the starting point of authoritarianism. And those talking points in the '16 campaign -- as they further escalated through the '18 election, the caravan, illegal immigration scare tactics, you know, the riot tactics -- it seems as though there is more of a realization about the harm of covering '16 when there was the failure to say, "These aren't your average talking points, you know, let's not just give Donald Trump a megaphone for bigotry. There is more absorption of that reality now, Brian, that that rhetoric is the origin of authoritarian conduct.
STELTER: Yeah, look at the caravan in 2016, as you said. This narrative starts on Fox and right-wing media, jumps to Trump, he starts talking about an invasion, and then it becomes a big talking point for the last three weeks of the campaign. And yet the GOP still suffers losses in the midterm elections, and some journalists have regrets for the way they covered the so-called caravan. And I think there were lessons learned from moments like that. Whether those lessons will apply now in 2020 remains to be seen although I do think there's been an attempt to challenge the President's extreme law and order rhetoric.
In a recent interview on PBS's The Open Mind, CNN host Brian Stelter plugged his anti-Fox News book by trying to portray CNN as a more accurate news channel than that of Fox News Channel.
In particular, he took aim at the morning show Fox and Friends, and portrayed the show as misinforming their audience, particularly citing coverage of the illegal immigrant caravan that began marching through Mexico toward the U.S. right before the 2018 midterm elections.
He boasted: "I work with people that take their jobs really seriously and care deeply about what they do. Obviously, we make mistakes, and we're held accountable for those mistakes... But at least there's an effort to get to the truth and report as accurately as we can."
He then took aim at Fox and Friends: "there's not a set of checks and balances. There's not a sense of 'You must uphold journalistic integrity,' and Fox and Friends producers admit all of this to me," referring to his book, Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth.
A bit later, he complained because the show covered the illegal immigrant caravan that was approaching the U.S. before the election, and claimed CNN was more accurate in trying to counter an allegedly fact-challenged Fox.
But, on the contrary, viewers of CNN's morning show, New Day, which runs opposite Fox and Friends, gave a more distorted picture as it was dismissive of the illegal immigration issue -- sometimes by citing misinformation -- in contrast with Fox which gave more coverage to the key problems that attract and give cover for illegals trying to scam and exploit the system.
Fox viewers were informed that most caravan members were single men, rather than women and children, that some would cross the border illegally in spite of being offered asylum in Mexico, and many would be allowed to stay in the U.S. for years to pursue asylum claims even though most would either not show up to court or would have their cases ultimately rejected even if they did.
While Fox frequently had guests who worked for knowledgeable entities like the Border Patrol, only a small number of right-leaning guests appeared on CNN where they were likely to be confronted with misinformation and liberal spin..
As the American Conservative Union's Matt Schlapp debated CNN host Alisyn Camerota, he argued that illegals sometime exploit children who are not even their own to scam Border Patrol agents into setting them free in the U.S., Camerota mockingly asked him, "Do they also get a luxury car?" and then pressed him to answer her obviously sarcastic question.
(The use of DNA testing on the border eventually proved Schlapp's point that fraudulent claims about family relationships really do happen.)
Camerota went on to misleadingly claim that only three members of a previous caravan had received asylum without recalling that hundreds actually entered the country -- some illegally, some legally -- and many still remain. She also repeated a false claim that illegal border crossers are not really breaking the law as long as they apply for asylum after getting caught, even though liberal law professor Jonathan Turley had previously called out CNN for spreading such misinformation.
In another appearance, she claimed that 88 percent of asylum seekers attend their asylum hearings without informing viewers that about 50 percent alleged asylum seekers in recent years had not bothered to apply for an asylum hearing after they were let loose into the country.
The show also cited questionable studies to claim illegal immigrants have a low crime rate and repeated discredited claims that then DHS-Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen had lied about family separations as a way of undermining her claims that hundreds of criminals had been identified by sources within the caravan.
CNN host John Berman repeatedly cited statistics showing illegal border crossings were much greater 20 years ago without clarifying that, back then, it was much easier to deport mostly Mexican nationals back to their home country whereas in recent years Central Americans have been more able to avoid deportation by exploiting legal loopholes.
In his book, Stelter also suggests Fox was misleading viewers by suddenly showing interest in the caravans that had been held for a number of years even though Fox and Friends hosts, in fact, informed viewers that the organizers had stepped up efforts to publicize these acts of protest, thus attracting more awareness.
And, on the subject of misleading viewers by suddenly noticing phenomena that are not new, CNN over the last few years has focused on a number of immigration enforcement issues to undermine the Trump administration that were also issues during the Obama administration like prosecuting birth certificate fraud cases, temporarily keeping illegals in cage-like structures (which were built by the Obama administration), losing track of unaccompanied children who were handed over to illegal immigrant family members, deaths of detainees, and complaints about conditions in detention facilities.
The weekend edition of New Day even fretted over the deportation of a new father without ever informing viewers that he was being extradited to Mexico to face homicide charges.
In spite of Stelter's complaints, Fox viewers were more likely to be presented with a better understanding of the critical issues of border security while CNN was more likely to give their viewers misinformation and cling to liberal spin.
And, under Obama, asylum claims by Central Americans were rejected in court 80 percent of the time.