On Monday, Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough stuffed his foot into his mouth with alarming force when he dismissed reports of a caravan of Central Americans travelling towards the U.S. as “absolutely preposterous.”
Scarborough and co-host Mika Brzezinski scoffed at tweets sent by President Trump over the weekend, in which he wrote that the border was “getting more dangerous" and referenced the caravan of would-be migrants headed for the U.S. border. “Some view this phrasing as Trump’s reaction to a Fox News segment about Central American migrants,” she continued, presumably reading off a teleprompter, “where ‘caravans’ appeared on screen.”
“Oh my God,” Brzezinski murmured. Scarborough shared in her outrage:
It’s amazing. He sees “caravan of immigrants headed to the U.S.,” which is an absolutely preposterous story, and then he goes to church, he makes a statement outside of church, repeats it verbatim, has all the facts wrong, and then he says he’s going to destroy a trade deal with Mexico and Canada.
He repeated this talking point just minutes later: “Here you have the President going out – again, because he saw a Fox News segment – going out and talking about, quote, ‘caravans of people coming to the United States.’” He emphasized "caravans," spitting out the word with disgust. Evidently, Scarborough and Brzezinski were indignant that Fox News would dare report on this supposedly “preposterous story."
The problem: the story was true, and the term “caravan” had not originated on Fox News.
In fact, Buzzfeed had first broken the story three days prior, in an article entitled, “A Huge Caravan Of Central Americans Is Headed For The US, And No One In Mexico Dares To Stop Them.” The piece chronicled the journey of a group of “more than 1,000" Central Americans who were marching on foot to the U.S. The carvan was organized by a group named Pueblos Sin Fronteras (People Without Borders in English).
Additionally, the liberal blog was far from the only outlet to use the verbiage that was now the target of Scarborough and Brzezinski’s ire. CNN and The Washington Post have also used Buzzfeed’s “caravan” terminology – probably because it's an accurate description. Thus, Brzezinski's claim that the President's tweets had been incited by a Fox News report was purely bad-faith speculation.
At no point did anyone present on the show acknowledge that practically every major news outlet was reporting on the caravan. In fact, given the disgust with which Scarborough and Brzezinski regarded the President’s claims, it’s possible that they may not even have been aware that the story was true. One certainly hopes that is the case; otherwise, their aggressive dismissals would make them look quite disingenuous indeed. Ironically, the show had opened that morning with a collective meltdown over supposedly dishonest local news outlets.
