Watch what they do: how the media showed their hands about the hyped "border crisis"

ABC News thinks the border is so dangerous that it flew all its top talent there. Screenshot grabbed for demonstration purposes.

The hosts and the guests headlining the Sunday shows were all about one thing this Sunday, regardless of what network you looked at: what they all, in unison and as if in collusion, incessantly talked about a 'crisis' at the US-Mexico border of unaccompanied children. This morning's news shows were panned out to create the same general impression.

To be sure, the situation at the border is troubling. Unaccompanied minors have been crossing the border at high numbers, and Joe Biden being a president who doesn't just care about babies when they are in the womb, his administration has reversed Donald Trump's cruel policy of kicking out children who are seeking refuge in the United States after fleeing unspeakable violence and threats in their home countries.

The influx, though, is directly attributable to actions of the Trump administration, something President Biden, Secretary Mayorkas, and the Biden administration is working diligently to fix. The border surge is the result of a bottleneck, which was created by the Trump administration's inhumane policies that turned back tens of thousands of children and ended an asylum program that minors could use to apply for and adjudicate their refugee resettlement status in the US without having to leave their homes. Started by President Obama in 2014, the program, which also gave minors with an approved refugee status safe passage to the US instead of having to undertake a painful, dangerous, and treacherous journey to the US border, was axed by Trump in 2017. That shutdown left children already in fear of violence and displacement in their own countries with only one option to present the United States with a refugee resettlement claim: travel to the US-Mexico border to do so in person.

One of the critical steps the Biden administration is taking to ease the border surge is, in fact, to put that program, known as the Central American Minors program, back together.

But you did not hear anchors utter any actual dissection of the problem at the border left by the wrecking ball that Donald Trump took to America's humanitarian refugee management programs, or the actual solutions the Biden administration is pursuing to ease the surge. What you did hear was suggestions that the Biden administration's promise to treat children - 80% of whom already have relatives in the United States, including 40% who have a parent or legal guardian here - humanely is a mistake.

The other thing you saw was theatrics. ABC News, for example, flew the entire "roundtable" crew of its Sunday show This week, to the border.

This stunt, done clearly in pursuit of a ratings bonanza and to give the show a dramatic flare, makes one thing clear: there is no crisis at the border, at least not for Americans.

Clearly, ABC felt that the situation at the border was safe and stable enough to station its entire set, and a properly socially distant, fully functional news crew - from an anchor to several guests to producers and camerapersons - right on it. This isn't a situation where a reporter and a camera crew is covering a dangerous situation on the ground; this is a whole production with all the bells, whistles and flares at what they otherwise keep pretending is ground zero for some dangerous, fearsome, crisis.

If there really were a 'crisis' at the southern border, ABC would not have flown their top talent to the border for fear of them getting hurt. That they didn't have concern about the safety of their talent makes it clear as daylight that the only crisis at the border is one manufactured by a media desperate to find something, anything to sling at this young, successful, Democratic administration.

There is a crisis at the border though, but it's not an American one. The real crisis - something the US mainstream media could have instead chosen to spend their time on but did not, since it would not fit into their concerted agenda to manufacture scandal against the Biden administration - is in the lives of the children who have had to leave their homes and their loved ones to, quite literally, save their lives.

Let's be perfectly clear what our media is really saying here: that the children - brown children - who are fleeing unfathomable poverty and war-like gang violence, seeking refuge to unite with their families in the US, and are not putting American lives in danger in any way are the crisis, and forcing them back into the violence and poverty they are desperate to escape is the solution.

All for theater.




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