POSTED BY MARTIN KICH
This news announcement is from Politico:
The Pentagon is set to begin a drawdown of its 5,800 troops from the Southwest border as early as this week, the Army commander overseeing the mission told POLITICO — even as the approaching caravan of refugees prompted U.S. customs officers to close a port of entry near Tijuana, Mexico.
All the active-duty troops that President Donald Trump ordered sent to the border before the midterm elections should be home by Christmas, said Army Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Buchanan, who is running the mission from San Antonio, Texas.
The following paragraphs are from an article from the CNN Wire and posted on the website of WBNO, the ABC affiliate in new Orleans:
From October 16 to November 6 — aka Election Day — President Donald Trump sent 45 tweets mentioning the “border” between the United States and Mexico. Between October 16 and October 31, he sent nine tweets referring to the “caravan” of migrants making their way across Mexico.
Here’s a typical one: “Many Gang Members and some very bad people are mixed into the Caravan heading to our Southern Border. Please go back, you will not be admitted into the United States unless you go through the legal process. This is an invasion of our Country and our Military is waiting for you!”
Since November 6—8 days and counting—Trump hasn’t mentioned the so-called caravan once in a tweet. He has used the word “border” a single time — in a tweet on November 9 in which Trump tweeted out a link to a “Presidential Proclamation Addressing Mass Migration Through the Southern Border of the United States” that said, essentially, that he was trying to push people entering the country illegally to specified ports of entry.
That discrepancy between Trump’s rhetoric in the runup to the election and his rhetoric after it exposes, beyond a shadow of a doubt, what most neutral observers initially suspected: That Trump’s decision to seize on the caravan of migrants making their way across Mexico in hopes of entering the United States was 100% a political ploy to rev up his base.
And the following excerpt is from an article on the Daily Beast:
Following the 2018 midterm elections, the migrant caravan—the one President Trump and the Republican Party insisted was a grave national-security crisis—has largely disappeared from GOP messaging. Trump has almost completely stopped talking about it in public, as have the Trumpist conspiracy theorists at Infowars.
The president’s allies at conservative cable-news giant Fox News, however, don’t seem to have gotten the memo.
A survey of recent transcripts recorded on the TV monitoring service TVEyes shows Fox News running at least 30 segments mentioning the caravan in the week since the midterm elections.
And, as the following graphs from Quartz shows, the rest of the media was equally attentive to this political stunt—before the election:
One can argue that the media coverage of Trump’s attempts to turn “The Caravan” into an impending national crisis exposed the obviousness and the hollowness of the tactic. One can also argue that the media coverage and public perceptions have become much more critical than it was during the 2016 election.
But given the ways in which the media focused on Trump during the 2016 election and profited greatly from doing so, there is still at least a faintly lingering stink of complicity. Cable television has almost as much to answer for as social media, in particular Facebook, does.
In his November 19 Reliable Sources daily newsletter, Brian Stelter provides a survey of recent articles on this broad topic of how the media serves Trump while ostensibly decrying his statements and behavior:
“Trump’s Lies Are a Virus, and News Organizations Are the Host”
That’s the title of Derek Thompson‘s latest for The Atlantic. More and more people are rethinking how the president is covered — specifically, how his malarkey is spread through media megaphones.
On Sunday’s “Reliable Sources,” Carl Bernstein said this about TV networks showing Trump’s events live: “I don’t think we should be taking them live all the time and just pasting them up on the air, because they’re basically just propagandist exercises.”
Thompson has a lot to say about this. Don’t miss his piece…
It pairs well with: Sean Illing‘s interview with George Lakoff: “How the media should respond to Trump’s lies”
The complete article on the WGNO website is available at: https://wgno.com/2018/11/14/donald-trump-has-sent-a-total-of-0-tweets-on-the-caravan-since-the-election/.
The complete article from the Daily Beast is available at: https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-shut-up-about-the-caravan-after-the-election-fox-news-cant-seem-to-let-it-go.
The complete article from Quartz is available at: https://qz.com/1467663/the-media-coverage-of-the-migrant-caravan-nearly-stopped-after-the-us-midterms/.
