Spotlighting Media Bias: Covering for Biden on the Border

Americans are increasingly attuned to the slanted media coverage on critical issues facing our nation. It’s one of the reasons why major newspapers and media outlets are declining in readership. It seems that the left-wing so-called mainstream media’s bias has penetrated nearly every issue we read about, from education to immigration, from healthcare to the economy. In fact, bias in the media has become so pervasive that we’ve begun tracking media bias in critical reporting over the last two decades.

Although we are only 90 days into the new year, there have already been several instances of media bias that have ranged from poor taste to journalistic malpractice. Here are some of the top flubs of 2023 so far.

One of the biggest gifts to Biden doled out by the press thus far has to be the slanted media coverage of President Biden’s immigration policies, from open borders to Title 42 and his long overdue visit to the U.S.-Mexico border in January 2023. Since President Biden assumed office in 2021, there have been over 4 million apprehensions by the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) along the Southern Border. These figures – over 2 million per year – are the highest ever recorded. The number of border crossings is obviously much higher than 4 million since these are only the crossings that we know about; many more got away. Despite the invasion brought on by the Biden White House’s failed open-border policies, the media has treated President Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris with kid gloves.

In a stunning admission last week, Border Patrol Chief Rual Ortiz contradicted his boss, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, when he told a House panel that the U.S. does not have “operational control” of the southern border. House Homeland Security Chairman Rep. Mark Green (R-TN) had asked Secretary Mayorkas a few months prior the same question he asked Chief Ortiz, does the U.S. have operational control of the border. Mayorkas answered “Yes, we do,” the Washington Times reported. But you won’t hear too much about the men and women on the ground protecting our country telling the truth about what they are facing. Instead you probably saw Secretary Mayorkas making the rounds on the Sunday morning talk shows by the same outlets helping the White House by churning out positive stories hailing President Biden for visiting the border, despite Republican calls for him to go over the last two years.

When it comes to the media’s coverage of President Biden versus their coverage of President Trump, there is little comparison, and no issue garnered more attention and more slanted coverage than immigration. For example, a 2021 Pew Research study found that right-leaning outlets focused more on immigration in the early days of the Biden presidency, while left-leaning outlets focused less on immigration. The Pew study tries to cast the media coverage of Trump’s immigration policies in his early days as being “more evenly distributed across outlets” with left-leaning, mixed and right-leaning audiences. These studies were early on in both presidencies and the results of their policies had not yet been realized. However, a 2017 Harvard University study of President Trump’s immigration policies in his first 100 days found that the “overall tone of major media outlets (CNN, NBC, CBS, FOX, NYT, WaPo, BBC, etc) was 80 percent negative.”

In other words, under President Biden, we hear little truth in the mainstream media about realities on the border and little coverage on the historic humanitarian crisis – nor the fact that it was brought on by Washington’s elite Democratic class in the first place as there were record low border crossings at the end of the Trump presidency. But under President Trump, the media was foaming at the mouth to spit out anti-Republican immigration stories about conservative policies that were actually supported by a majority of Americans, that kept our border secure, and kept Americans safe.

Similarly, President Biden’s plans to shift $400 billion in student loan debt from borrowers to taxpayers is the latest example of the press failing the American people. A recent analysis conducted by Frederick M. Hess, American Enterprise Institute (AEI) Senior Fellow and Education Policy Studies Director and AEI Research Assistant Caitlyn Aversman examined a random sample of 100 news stories from five major newspapers (Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Washington Post, USA Today, and The Wall Street Journal) covering the controversy.

The authors found that out of the 100 stories, “there were a total of 459 quotes, with supportive quotes dramatically outnumbering skeptical ones, by 62% to 24% — a pattern far out of line with public sentiment.” Hess and Aversman write that “more than two-thirds of all quotes were provided by Democratic officials, progressive advocates, or borrowers, while less than one-fifth were offered by policy or legal experts (just 12% were provided by Republican officials or taxpayer advocates). When public officials were quoted on Biden’s proposal, Democrats accounted for 81% of quotes; Republicans just 19%.”

The disparity and Democratic slant in the media is no longer debatable. Sadly, more and more writers are doing a disservice to the American people and those that do their job objectively don’t get elevated or don’t get the byline at all. We’ve come to the point that even Op-Eds and Letters to the Editor that challenge “woke” thinking are being censored. As long as that continues, those legacy subscribers will continue to jump ship, and we will be here continuing to shine a light on the truth.

Bob Carlstrom is President of AMAC Action