On a day mostly filled with hurricane coverage, CBS This Morning on Friday managed to shove in some liberal bias. The co-hosts eagerly hyped Harvard University’s president and her denouncement of Donald Trump over the “cruel” end of DACA. Charlie Rose breathlessly related, “President Trump's decision affects dozens of current Harvard students.”
He quoted, “[Drew] Faust wrote in a message to the Harvard community, quote, ‘This cruel policy recognizes neither justice nor mercy.’” He added, “She went on to promise the university will maintain its existing financial aid policies and provide funding to students regardless of immigration status.”
Rather than challenge Faust at all, Rose offered her an open platform: “Tell me why you think this is so important to take a stand at this time on DACA.”
[The bias on CBS This Morning was sponsored by Volvo, Verizon and Hood cottage cheese.]
A partial transcript is below:
CBS This Morning
9/8/17
8:41am ETNORAH O’DONNELL: Harvard University's President Drew Faust is taking a stand against President Trump's decision to end the DACA program. The policy protects undocumented immigrants who arrived in this country illegally as children. It means they can go to work or go to school without fear of deportation.
CHARLIE ROSE: President Trump's decision will affect dozens of current Harvard students. Faust wrote in a message to the Harvard community, quote, “This cruel policy recognizes neither justice nor mercy.” She went on to promise the university will maintain its existing financial aid policies and provide funding to students regardless of immigration status. Faust is Harvard University's 28th president and the first woman to lead the school. She joins us now and we're pleased to have her here. Good morning.
DREW FAUST: Good morning.
ROSE: I should say this will be your last graduation.
FAUST: Coming up in June. Yes it will.
ROSE: But you’ll stay in Cambridge and go back to being a historian.
FAUST: Go back to that, yes.
ROSE: Tell me why you think this is so important to take a stand at this time on DACA.
FAUST: This was an issue that came to my attention soon after I became President. More than ten years ago when a group of undocumented students came to see me and described their lives. And here were these Harvard students, extraordinary scholars who had distinguished themselves in high school and were pursuing higher education and wanted to become doctors and inventors and scientists and writers and their lives were just suffused with uncertainty and fear that they might be picked up on the street any day. They might be sent back to countries they'd never known, because they might have been two or three years old when they came or even younger when they came to the United States. This issue seemed to me an important one, and so it's one I've been speaking out on and writing about and lobbying about for a decade now. The DACA program gave these students a measure of relief from that uncertainty and an ability to work, do work study and support their education, an ability to dream about the futures that meant so much to them and to all of us.
NORAH O’DONNELL: Do you think there's some merit to the argument by the Trump administration there should be a legislative remedy for this?
FAUST: I would hope we can get a legislative remedy and Senator Durbin's pushing of the D.R.E.A.M. Act over the years has been a very important commitment and one that would solve this problem, if it could be realized legislatively. So I do hope there will be an act that will protect these students, but in the meantime, they're now cast back into tremendous uncertainty and anxiety.
