NewsBusters Podcast: Border Buoys and Border Bigots

July 26th, 2023 10:47 PM

On several occasions, the Media Research Center have studied how the dramatic increase of illegal immigration under President Biden have been downplayed, even neglected by the evening news shows of ABC, CBS and NBC. A new MRC study of evening-news coverage of immigration found the networks have done more coverage as the Title 42 policy elapsed. But despite the additional coverage, the tone is obvious: the networks engage in blatant advocacy for illegal immigration.

Bill D'Agostino reviews the coverage and then includes recent coverage of border buoys in Texas blocking access on the Rio Grande. On every network, the illegal immigrant is honored and celebrated, and the costs of a surge of illegal immigration on education, health, welfare, and criminal justice are ignored. In 254 minutes of network coverage, they did not once use terms like "illegal immigration," "illegal immigrant," or "illegal alien."

Many of these tendencies were also identified in a 2006 Special Report we did on the immigration policy debate...except back then, "illegal" wasn't yet banned from the script. As they do on many issues, the networks mentioned "conservatives" 89 times, and found "liberals" only three times, all of them on ABC.

The vanishing White House cocaine story, the emerging story on Biden dog bites, Biden weirdly saying he "ended cancer as we know it," and "independent fact checkers" make their way into the list of topics.

Enjoy the podcast below, or wherever you listen to podcasts.