Just as we finished up our study looking at the last nine and a half months of border coverage, the broadcast networks began shrieking in disgust at a line of red buoys that Texas Governor Greg Abbott had installed in the Rio Grande. Over the past week their buoy-induced wailing has already eclipsed the airtime given to issues like child labor and drug smuggling since October of 2022.
MRC analysts found that between July 19 and July 26, broadcast networks ABC, CBS, and NBC spent a combined 2056 seconds (34 min, 16 sec) on the buoys across their flagship morning and evening newscasts. Even if we look only at evening newscasts, as our recent study did, we’re left with 935 seconds (15 min, 35 sec) — more than these networks over the last ten months have spent on migrant child labor (807 seconds), illegal crossings from Canada (323 seconds), and drug smuggling (294).
The media hate these buoys for the same reason that they hate any other barrier along our southern border: because they make it harder for illegal aliens to enter the country. It really is that simple. Just look at how they’ve been talking about them:
On June 23, NBC’s Priscilla Thompson found her star witnesses in her case against Abbott’s new border security measure: aspiring illegal aliens who — surprisingly — were not fans of the buoys:
Some migrants believe these buoys put them at risk. This man from Venezuela says, “We come with children, walking for months, to find this barrier that we cannot cross.”
She also found a distraught-looking couple who were so frightened by the buoys that they waded across the river a few hundred yards away and illegally crossed there instead. “She’s eight months pregnant,” Thompson remarked, thus proving once and for all that the buoys were indeed Very Bad.
The coverage numbers tell a story, but it doesn’t take a study for the average person to recognize that the media love open borders. Nor do journalists don’t have to tip their hand as clumsily as NBC’s José Díaz-Balart did with that dramatic speech of his back in May. Over the years they’ve made their views on the southern border abundantly clear through their coverage. These networks have spent countless hours covering illegal immigration, yet none of them ever discuss the cost their infantile notion of altruism would impose on America.
The reason for this is not a mystery. It’s because they don’t care about the cost, and they’re worried that if their viewers become aware of it, they might form the wrong political opinion. After years of the same behavior from every journalist who’s shown up at the border with a camera and a microphone, one can’t dismiss this as speculation. It’s just reality.
