Don's Tuesday Column

        THE WAY I SEE IT   by Don Polson Red Bluff Daily News   1/15/2019

   Border follies, facts and fencing

Witness our supposedly neutral, objective news media. The current dispute over America’s inconsistently guarded southern border—and the undeniable crisis associated with illegal entry, human trafficking, drug smuggling and terrorist threat—shows how so many of our news providers substitute partisan judgment for a factual search, “the whole truth.” Such judgments skew which stories, data, audio and video are provided to us.

Start with “The Top Fake News Stories of 2018,” put together by The Daily Caller’s Amber Athey. Of the 30 or so entries, 6 involved illegal immigration and our border. “The associated Press published a report in June about abuse of child immigrants in the U.S., but did its best to bury the fact that the abuse primarily occurred under the Obama administration.” 

President Trump’s “zero-tolerance” policy was mentioned prominently numerous times; AP only noted in the 20^th paragraph that the abuse began in 2016, never naming Obama.

“Several reporters claimed during the uproar over President Donald Trump’s family separations at the border that President Barack Obama never separated families.” This was completely wrong; even former Obama officials admitted that separations occurred.

“The Daily Beast claimed that there is ‘zero evidence’ that members of the migrant caravan were bringing HIV and TB into the United States.” This was refuted by the Tijuana Health Department’s reporting of tuberculosis, HIV and chickenpox among the caravan. Baja California officials disputed the tuberculosis but confirmed the presence of HIV and chickenpox.

In perhaps the most egregious visual misrepresentation, Time Magazine merged a photo of Trump supposedly looking down on a crying Honduran child to advance the narrative of family separations at the border. The child’s image was clipped from another photo and divorced from the facts that “the mother and her child were not fleeing violence, and the mother had been previously deported from the U.S…and had left three other children in Honduras while paying a smuggler to get her across the border illegally.”

The Washington Post duplicitously tried to assign blame for the death of a 7-year-old migrant child from Guatemala on the Border Patrol in December. “Despite WaPo’s misleading headline [that suggested Border Patrol culpability], the full timeline of events and statements from the girl’s father praising border agents revealed a different story.”

In what has become a pattern of odious misreporting from CNN’s Jim Acosta, he argued with President Trump that “illegal immigrants would ‘not be’ trying to climb over the U.S.-Mexico border wall.” It was his obnoxious way of questioning the reinforcement of Border Patrol officers; within a week, migrants were indeed climbing over border fencing. This same sorry excuse for a reporter just last week embarrassed himself by trying to “prove” the ineffectiveness of Trump’s proposed border wall by standing next to a section of structural steel “bollard-type” barrier in Texas.

With camera rolling, Acosta snidely pointed out that there were no visible threats to America’s border or citizens—oblivious that he was proving the efficacy of a nearly insurmountable barrier. In interviews with the Border Patrol in charge of that sector, Sean Hannity found that the areas with those barriers accounted for a tiny fraction (around 5 percent) of the intrusions; the rest occurring where no such barriers existed.

So, President Trump addressed the nation last week, producing a plethora of rebuttals and so-called “fact-checks” (in reality, opinion and spin presented as objective analysis) by some of the same outlets that committed the gross errors listed above. They went so far as to formulate “pre-buttals” and brag of “eating Wheaties” to fortify themselves for the task of ferreting out Trump’s lies. Trump made no errors.

In contrast: 1) News sources attempted to refute the “terrorism” coming through the border—drugs are a part of the terrorist strategy. Hezbollah uses its resources to smuggle drugs, which kill Americans, and uses the proceeds to further actual terrorism. Many non-Central Americans are apprehended; we don’t know if they have terrorist ties until they’re investigated.

2) They shamelessly tried to dismiss the idea that we have a crisis at the southern border; it’s an obvious crisis when unaccompanied children and families arrive in the tens of thousands and overwhelm detention facilities. 3) News media voices tried to dismiss the violence and criminality by illegal aliens; while the federal prisons incarcerate non-citizens, any thorough analysis has found that, while legal immigrants offend at low levels, illegals have vastly higher crime rates than all others. Texas found almost 240,000 convictions in their state prisons involving illegal aliens; Texas has less than 10 percent of America’s population. Do the math.

Here are a couple of useful sources: “January 2019: When media fact-checkers finally jumped the shark,” by Larry O’Connor. The obsession with trying to “prove” Trump’s lies has led the media to forget they had little interest in the veracity of Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, easily proven to be “congenital liars.” Mollie Hemmingway’s exhaustive piece, “Media’s Angry Response To President Trump’s Oval Office Speech Comes Up Short” showed Democrats and media mimicking each other over “facts, not fear.”

“Trump spoke about the American people. He made it plain that he is working to benefit them, especially those in the front lines of dealing with the harm wrought by people who ought never to have been here in the first place. Pelosi and Schumer spoke about Trump. Their hatred was manifest and could cause people to wonder whether they’re working for the good of Americans or simply to import voters…drugs and violence.” (Bookwormroom.com)

“Democrats Can Fund the World, but Not the Wall” (Brian C. Joondeph), says it all. Consider the most effective defensive walls in existence: the Israeli-built walls have stopped around 98 percent of deaths (457 in 2002; 8 in 2009) at the hands of Palestinians; the Great Wall of China has protected that nation for thousands of years.