Did You See Reuters' Anti-Trump WH Correspondent Get Owned by the Facts on Immigration?
There is an abundance of journalists and reporters — particularly among the pool of White House correspondents — who profess with their mouths to be neutral and objective but reveal through their actions a deep and abiding animus and bias against President Donald Trump.
One of the more glaringly hypocritical among those individuals is Jeff Mason — chief White House correspondent for Reuters who also previously served as president of the White House Correspondents’ Association — a reporter who claims to be unbiased and neutral but routinely provides slanted coverage that portrays the president and his administration in a poor light, whether such coverage has been earned or not.
Mason’s anti-Trump bias was clearly on display Wednesday when he posted on Twitter after a White House briefing on immigration to suggest that Trump had lied about the number of illegal immigrants suspected of residing within the United States.
Mason tweeted, “Trump says, without evidence, there are probably 30-35 million people in the United States illegally.”
Trump says, without evidence, there are probably 30-35 million people in the United States illegally
— Jeff Mason (@jeffmason1) January 2, 2019
Mason’s tweet implied that there was no evidence whatsoever to support Trump’s claim, but in reality there is, which means that Mason is probably either too lazy and sloppy to look up the evidence on his own or is so committed to opposing Trump that he simply “believes” there is no evidence and will ignore anything that runs contrary to that belief.
Those two possibilities were not explicitly mentioned, but aren’t difficult to imply, in a responding tweet from Emily Larsen, a reporter for The Daily Caller, which provided the readily available evidence that supported Trump’s claim.
Most estimates, based on Census data checked against estimates on lawful immigrants, say there are around 11 million undocumented. But a newish Yale study says it could be as high as 35 million. https://t.co/l72ifW2JQ1
More on population estimates here: https://t.co/IlCMe6mSSv https://t.co/zzex0PPteW— Emily Larsen (@emilyelarsen) January 2, 2019
Larsen tweeted, “Most estimates, based on Census data checked against estimates on lawful immigrants, say there are around 11 million undocumented. But a newish Yale study says it could be as high as 35 million.” Her tweet included a link to the Yale University study.
Yale Insights reported in September that three researchers affiliated with the university had abandoned the old standard technique of basing guesstimates about the illegal immigrant population off Census reports and surveys and instead devised a mathematical modeling engine that took into account a variety of additional information including demographics and immigration operations data.
The modeling resulted in a range of numbers that were significantly higher than the previous estimate of around 11 million — which has been persistently touted since the late 1990s — and instead suggested the population to be somewhere around 22 million illegal immigrants living in the U.S.
The report noted, “After running 1,000,000 simulations of the model, the researchers’ 95% probability range is 16 million to 29 million, with 22.1 million as the mean.” An accompanying chart, which displayed all of the various models, showed a range of results that went from as low as around 12 million to top out at greater than 35 million.
The researchers stressed that their study shouldn’t be viewed as implying that there has been any sort of recent influx of illegal migrants, but that the old estimate of approximately 11 million was likely too low to begin with and has consistently understated the size of the illegal population ever since.
This study from Yale researchers received plenty of media attention, so it isn’t like it was classified or impossible for Mason to find — he just didn’t bother to look for it before firing off his tweet that implied the president was just making up numbers out of thin air.
The evidence to support Trump’s claim was and remains readily available, even if the president himself didn’t whip it out during the briefing and call everyone’s attention to the particular page or chart to highlight the top range of the estimate, which is where his own estimate came from.
Thus, Reuters White House correspondent Jeff Mason is either too lazy to do his own research before bashing the president, or he is blinded by his bias and partisanship and has refused to acknowledge the evidence that is readily obtainable.
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