Topic: Media Research Center
President Trump has been pushing the idea that all illegal immigrants are scary, if not actively coming to kill you, and the Media Research Center wants to help that narrative along.
A Jan. 17 post by Brad Wilmouth complained that "CNN senior political analyst John Avlon presented another of his infamous "Reality Check" segments, which is more akin to liberal spin than an actual effort to clearly inform viewers about the issues. The CNN analyst argued against a border wall as he cited Politifact to dismiss claims of 2,000 homicides being committed by illegal immigrants in one year being reported by ICE for FY2018." Wilmouth went on to convolutedly rant about the PolitiFact fact-check:
If one takes a look at the Politifact article he cited, it reads like another lame fact check that the site has become famous for that spins for liberals. The analysis has a point in that the 2,000 homicides cited do not actually come from 2018 since illegals who commit homicides are usually deported after they have spent years serving their sentences in prison, so the total number of homicides committed by illegal aliens in 2018 or any particular year is still unclear.
But the fact-checking site also bizarrely tried to suggest that many homicides were not so bad since not all homicides are actually murders. But legal justifiable homicides tend to make up only a small portion of total homicides, and manslaughter cases are still serious matters in which someone died even if they do not fit the legal definition of murder.
Additionally, if the site had bothered to check numbers for previous years, there were at least a couple of years -- 2011 and 2012 -- when the Obama adiministration reported a number of homicide cases processed by ICE as being well over 1,000, suggesting that numbers between 1,000 and 2,000 may actually be typical and reflective of how many homicides are committed by illegals each year.
And, in FY2017, ICE processed illegal immigrants who had similarly committed almost 1,900 homicides.
And, in a country where over the past 20 years the total number of homicides nationwide tends to vary between 14,000 and 17,000 a year, such numbers from illegal immigrants would represent a substantial chunk -- and probably a disproportionately high portion -- of the nation's homicides.
Actually, the PolitiFact article debunks the claim a lot more than Wilmouth would admit, further explaining that "those offenses could have been accumulated over many years — not just 2017 — and didn’t necessarily happen the same year ICE arrested these people. In addition, a homicide could be a murder, but it could also be an accidental killing. Finally, ICE didn’t pick any of these folks up for murder; it picked them up for being in violation of the nation’s immigration laws." The number also doesn't reflect when homicide charges are dropped.
The next day, the MRC dropped any subtlety on the issue with a headline screaming "Seven Horrific Crimes by Illegal Immigrants that Networks BURIED." In it, Bill D'Agostino insisted that all crimes by illegal immigrants demand national news coverage -- no matter how minor, apparently -- because, duh, they're illegals:
Crimes perpetrated by illegal aliens deserve attention because, by their very nature, all of them theoretically could have been prevented with sufficient enforcement of existing laws. Even if the crime rate among illegal aliens were a fraction of that among the native population, those few offenses still committed would be otherwise avoidable if the culprits had been either deported or prevented from entering in the first place.
MRC analysts examined Nexis transcripts of all network evening news coverage from 2018 and compiled the following list of some of the most heinous crimes committed by unlawful residents over the past year. None of these stories received even a second of evening news coverage – with the exception of the Colorado Spring Wildfire, which the networks briefly covered without mentioning the accused’s immigration status.
As usual, the MRC "study" is limited only to CBS, NBC and ABC -- because it's easier to monitor only a half-hour of programming a day -- and ignores its favorite channel, Fox News, completely.
