You just know that things are bad when the network evening newscasts have to actually make the time to report on the ongoing explosion at the southern border. Tonight, all three networks reported on the record detentions this week. None, however, reported on the White House's tie-in to the awful prisoner swap with the Maduro dictatorship in Venezuela.
The tidiest of these reports, CBS’s item on the border explosion, clocks in at 26 seconds:
MARGARET BRENNAN: Well, President Biden is sending top officials, including the Secretaries of State and Homeland Security, to meet with Mexico's president Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador in the coming days about this worsening migrant crisis along the southern border. More than 10,000 migrants a day have been processed every day this week along that U.S. Mexico border, according to data obtained by CBS News.
NBC and ABC had more extensive entries focused not just on the surge numbers, but on the ongoing brinksmanship between the State of Texas and the City of Chicago. When Mayor Brandon Johnson ordered the impounding of buses transporting migrants to The Windy City, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott simply ordered the migrants to be flown in, and dropped off at O’Hare.
NBC’s Guad Venegas spoke to some of the migrants, and conveyed their stories of falling ill after walking for 30 hours straight- a migrant storytelling holdover from his Telemundo days.
What none of the networks showed, though, was this nugget from today’s White House press briefing. The White House now considers the awful prisoner exchange with Venezuela as dealing with, get this, the “root causes” of the ongoing exodus from that country.
JOHN KIRBY: I would also add that one of the things that President López Obrador and the President talked about today was trying to work on getting at the root causes of migration. We’re seeing record levels of people. More people are on the move in this hemisphere than — that has been the case since World War Two. There’s a lot of factors. And part of that is, of course, dealing with instability — political and — and domestic instability in the region. So, the work that we did with Venezuela here — not just to get Americans back, but to get the Maduro regime to ascribe to certain electoral reforms — that’s important. That’s important to help get at some of the root causes of migration.
Excuse me, WHAT? The root cause of Venezuelan migration to the United States is the Maduro regime. And releasing Saab back to Venezuela, which White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre weirdly characterized as a “hostage exchange”, only served to strengthen the dictatorship.
That, however, was messier than the border narrative allows, and therefore did not make the evening news.
To view the ABC transcript, click HERE
To view the CBS transcript, click HERE
To view the NBC transcript, click HERE
