Oops: Live MSNBC Report Reveals Caravan Is Mostly Adult Males
If we know one thing about the migrant caravan from the media, it’s that it’s comprised almost exclusively of women and children. Any report about the situation must include the words “women and children” in at least 45 percent of sentences, almost as if its an FCC rule held over from the Obama administration.
Oh, yes, and they’re seeking asylum. Did we mention that? Women and children seeking asylum. Asylum-seeking women and children. Children seeking asylum and women seeking asylum and lots and lots of children and more children and women and their children. Back to you, Clarissa.
This is great drama, almost like something out of “Network” if Howard Beale were being played by Rachel “You’re Awake, By the Way” Maddow. (Someone get her a taupe raincoat, please.)
Unfortunately, as “Network” should have taught all of us, reality is a funny thing and it doesn’t necessarily conform to what the networks want. They can usually manage this all pretty well, unless someone inadvertently tells the truth.
That can happen anywhere — even on MSNBC, where reporter Gadi Schwartz was live from the caravan tent city in Tijuana, Mexico and revealed that the demographics of the caravan were, um, slightly different than women and children and women and children and also women.
MSNBC anchor Stephanie Ruhle decried the fact that President Donald Trump was saying that “it’s not women and children, it’s stone-cold criminals.” (This is a gross mischaracterization of his quote, but it’s MSNBC, so there’s not much surprise there.)
MSNBC anchors get completely rekt by their own reporter on the ground covering the migrant caravan.
ANCHOR: “It’s innocent women and children right?”
REPORTER: “From what we’ve seen, the majority are actually men and some of these men have not articulated that need for asylum” pic.twitter.com/tWBTkeGmSE
— Benny (@bennyjohnson) November 26, 2018
“You’re in that tent camp,” Ruhle said to Schwartz. “What is the profile of who is there mostly, and what are they looking for?” She went on to say that those who charged the border on Sunday may have “thought it was their only chance.”
While Schwartz said there were some “women and children,” he also said “the truth is the majority of people that are part of this caravan … the majority of them are men.
“When this becomes a polarized political issue in the United States, you have people on one side who point and say there are women and children here, and that is true. And then there are others who point and say, uh, that these are men that are trying to cross the border, and that’s true, too.
“From what we’ve seen, the majority are actually men,” he added. “And some of these men have not articulated that need for asylum. Instead, they have talked about going to the United States for a better life, to find work.”
So, several things to unpack here. First, there’s nothing wrong with “going to the United States for a better life, to find work.” We have ways you can do that via legal immigration pathways.
That, uh, doesn’t appear to be the aim here.
That’s not what this caravan was supposed to be about, however. We were told, in news segments slathered with lachrymosity, that these were people escaping credible fear in Honduras. What was that credible fear? That didn’t seem to matter — remember, believe all credible fearers.
Except that’s not the case. In one of the greatest instances of euphemism since “illegal aliens” became “undocumented immigrants,” we’re told that “these men have not articulated that need for asylum.”
Oops.
That’s quite literally the entire moral underpinning of defending the caravan — the fact that these are people ready, willing and very able to articulate why they need asylum.
And that’s not even the best part. That has to be reserved for the fact that Ruhle seems so convinced that she’s set up her reporter up to own Donald Trump and … well, then that happened. The most he could say is that there were, in fact, women and children there — but that there were a lot more men.
But that’s the thing about the media. They’re not going to leave you alone in your living rooms with your facts and your respect for immigration law. They want you to get mad at Trump.
And then reality sets in. They can keep on saying women and children and women and children as many times as they want, but that doesn’t wallpaper over the facts.
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