On Monday's Deadline: White House on MSNBC, fill-in host Katy Tur not only repeated the discredited myth that the Barack Obama administration deported more illegal immigrants than previous Presidents, she complained because Donald Trump supporters refused to believe her when she presented them with her flawed data during the 2016 presidential campaign.
The segment she was hosting also included the latest example of MSNBC blaming Fox News and conservative talk radio for many voters not believing the liberal media, rather than the media's biased reporting.
At 4:26 p.m. Eastern, as the group discussed President Trump's attacks on the media's credibility, MSNBC justice and security analyst Matthew Miller began complaining about conservatives undermining the liberal media: "This is a problem that the conservative side built a long time ago."
As Tur injected to agree, Miller placed blame onto Fox News as he continued:
It was Fox News that started telling you that the rest of the media, "You can't trust." They started telling you, "Scientists, you't can't trust -- they're telling you lies about climate change." They started to demonize and delegitimize institutions, and then you have Donald Trump who shows up and capitalizes on the opportunity they created in a much, much worse way than we've seen before.
Tur then turned to anti-Trump and right-leaning MSNBC contributor Charlie Sykes, who invoked his criticism of conservative talk radio: "You wrote a brilliant op ed on this years ago talking about how conservative talk radio did this. You asked for a bit of a mea culpa for a role that you played in it."
The MSNBC host then recalled a case in which she confronted a Trump supporter with what she believed to be evidence that Trump was wrong to complain that Obama had not deported enough illegal immigrants.
Here's more from Tur: "I will just leave us with this one story. I was in Miami when Donald Trump was campaigning, and I was talking to a gentleman who was telling me why he liked Donald Trump, and he said he's going to be really tough on immigration, and he's going to deport all of these undocumented immigrants."
She added: "And I said, you know, 'President Obama has deported more undocumented immigrants than anybody. I mean, he's done it more.' And the guy looked at me in the face and said, 'That's not true -- you're lying.' And I said, 'No, there are stats to prove it.'"
After noting that she showed him numbers that allegedly proved Obama deported record numbers of illegals, she lamented: "He looked at the empirical evidence and said, 'I don't believe that.'"
But Tur did not mention that the numbers often cited are misleading, as recounted by Snopes, because, toward the end of the George W. Bush administration, the government began counting illegal immigrants who were caught near the border and deported when those cases had previously not been included in the official numbers.
Virginia Republican Congressman Bob Goodlatte has also made this critical point in the past while appearing on CNN.
Sykes was true to form as an MSNBC Republican as he not only did not correct Tur's misleading claims, but just complained about the U.S. being in a "post-truth" environment.
