CNS Managing Editor Obsesses Over Chicago Violence To Distract From Mass Shootings Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com managing editor Michael W. Chapman has occasionally invoked violence in Chicago when it suited his right-wing agenda. For instance, in 2016 he featured spotlight-loving Wisconsin sheriff David Clarke touting how "there have been 455 murders in Chicago so far this year, which is greater than the 270 coalition soldiers killed in Afghanistan since 2013." Given how Clarke has since abruptly resigned from his sheriff amid lawsuits and became so toxic and extreme that even the Trump administration wouldn't hire him and Fox News barred him from appearing on the channel, this one hasn't aged too well. Chapman also wrote about Chicago violence afewtimes in 2017 and 2018, and he hadn't written about it at all for the first seven months of 2019..
But with the El Paso and Dayton massacres in early August -- one of which was clearly influenced by right-wing anti-immigration rhetoric that President Trump -- Chapman found a new reason to invoke Chicago: as a distraction. We've already noted that in an article just a couple days after the massacres, Chapman claimed that "51 people were shot in Chicago and seven of the victims died" the same weekend of the massacres, huffily adding that "the liberal media did not express nationwide outrage over that gun violence and politicians did not blame President Doanld Trump for the violence."
Chapman became mildly obsessed with Chicago violence for the next few weeks:
On Aug. 12, he wrote that "shootings in Chicago left 4 people dead and 43 wounded" over the previous weekend.
On Aug. 26, he detailed that "Over the weekend, six people were killed and 29 people were wounded by gunfire in Chicago" and that "1,800 people have been shot in Chicago since Jan. 1, 2019,"adding that "For comparison, there were 1,196 people killed in "mass shootings" -- four or more people killed by a lone shooter -- in the United States between Aug. 1, 1966 and August 19, 2019, according to The Washington Post."
On Sept. 9, he wrote: "Despite having some of the toughest gun control laws in the country, Chicago experienced another weekend of gun violence with 34 people shot, six of them fatally, reported the Chicago Sun-Times. That's on top of the 44 people shot, nine fatally over the Labor Day weekend, and the 282 Chicagoans killed by guns since the first of the year." He again compared the number to mass killings: "ABC News, using a definition of four (or more) people killed in a one-day incident, reported on Sept. 3 that at least 116 people had been killed in mass shootings."
Chapman hasn't written about Chicago violence since. Perhaps the massacre story has sufficiently faded that he doesn't feel the need to.
Terry Jeffrey Trump Deficit Blame Avoidance Watch Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com editor in chief Terry Jeffrey's issues with declining to blame President Trump and Republicans by name continued in a Sept. 9 article complaining that "the federal debt had already increased by more than a trillion dollars in fiscal 2019 with more than three weeks to go in the fiscal year":
At the close of business on Sept. 28, 2018, the last business day of fiscal 2018, the total federal debt was $21,516,058,183,180.23, according to the Treasury.
At the close of business on Sept. 4, 2019, it was $22,517,297,955,639.18.
At that point, the federal debt had increased by $1,001,239,772,458.95 in fiscal 2019.
As of Sept. 6, 2019, the latest day for which federal debt numbers have been reported by the Treasury, the debt had risen to $22,532,757,499,591.39.
Thus, so far in fiscal 2019, the federal debt has increased $1,016,699,316,311.16.
As usual, the words "Trump" and "Republican" appear nowhere in the article. As usual, he tries to implicitly blame Democrats for the deficit by including his favorite stock photo of Trump and House Majority Leader Nancy Pelosi together.
Jeffrey followed that with a Sept. 13 article complaining that "The federal government spent a record $4,155,323,000,000 in the first eleven months of fiscal 2019" while it "ran a deficit of $1,067,156,000,000." Again, the words "Trump" and "Republican" are missing, and again, Jeffrey's favorite Trump-Pelosi stock photo is used.
This story has a tag at the end that "The business and economic reporting of CNSNews.com is funded in part with a gift made in memory of Dr. Keith C. Wold." Once again, we have to wonder if Wold's memory is best served by such misleading, politically driven economic reporting.
CNS Blogger Touts Trump's Bogus Attack On Poll He Doesn't Like Topic: CNSNews.com
Craig Bannister was in full pro-Trump stenography mode in a Sept. 10 CNSNews.com blog post:
Americans are being misled by “phony polling information” produced and reported by hostile news media, President Donald Trump said Tuesday.
In the first of two tweets on the subject, Trump recalled how results of a “fake poll” by ABC/Washington Post during his 2016 campaign were drastically revised after his lawyers protested:
[...]
The ABC/Washington Post poll results referenced by Trump appear to be from its 2016 election tracking poll published on October 23rd of that year, which reported that “Clinton leads Trump by 12 percentage points among likely voters, 50 to 38 percent.” On November 1, 2016, The Washington Post reported the tracking poll showed that “Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are all but tied.”
But as Bannister's Media Research Center colleague Nicholas Fondacaro should have learned by now, just because you don't like the numbers doesn't mean that they're false.And Bannister also omits the context of Trump's remarks in order to portray them as unquestioned fact.
Vox reports that Trump's attack was promoted by a new ABC/Washington Post poll showing dismal numbers for him. Vox also explained why the 2016 poll showing him 12 points behind Clinton wasn't "fake" or "phony" at all:
The final Post-ABC tracking poll before the November 2016 election found that Hillary Clinton had the support of 47 percent of likely voters, compared to 43 percent for Trump. That’s not far off from Clinton’s ultimate margin of victory in the popular vote, which was 48 percent to 46 percent. In fact, Clinton’s edge in that final poll did “not reach statistical significance, given the poll’s 2.5 percentage-point margin in sampling error around each candidate’s support,” as the Post noted in its writeup at the time. And one factor working in Trump’s favor that the Post also noted was that he was ahead in a number of battleground states.
The Post didn’t respond to a request for comment about Trump’s accusation that they manipulated their 2016 polls after Trump’s “lawyers protested,” but a graph of their polling shows, predictably, that Clinton’s lead widened after the Access Hollywood tape was released in early October 2016, only to steadily narrow as the WikiLeaks dumps and FBI Director James Comey’s letter to Congress about the investigation of her emails rocked her campaign.
It was difficult to foresee that Trump would lose the popular vote while winning the Electoral College. But the fact remains that although the Post-ABC polling underrepresented Trump’s support by about 3 percentage points, it pegged Clinton’s support within a point, and correctly predicted the winner of the popular vote. The poll that Trump now bashes as “inaccurate” certainly left open the possibility that he might ultimately prevail.
In short, Trump is trying to rewrite history.
And Bannister is all too eager to help Trump rewrite it instead of following the journalistic duty to tell the full truth.
CNS: 'People' Leave NYC, But 'Immigrants' Move In Topic: CNSNews.com
Apparently, CNSNews.com doesn't view immigrants as fully human.
Kharen Martinez Murcia wrote in a Sept. 6 CNS article: "An estimated 277 people are moving out of the New York City metro area every day, a loss that is being cushioned by a large influx of immigrants, reports Bloomberg News."
That's interesting wording. Immigrants are not people? Apparently not at CNS.
Martinez Murcia also cribbed from the Bloomberg article that “[f]rom July 2017 to July 2018, a net of close to 200,000 New Yorkers sought a new life outside the Big Apple while the area welcomed almost 100,000 net international migrants.” Highlighting that seems to betray the same anti-immigrant bias, since CNS apparently assumes that all thet people leaving are fully fledged Americans and everyone coming in is probably an "illegal alien" or something. It also doesn't account for whether any of the "people" leaving New York are also immigrants.
Martinez Murcia went on to state in the first paragraph that New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo "claims the exodus is being fueled by a $10,000 cap on deductions for state and local taxes," suggesting the issue was a state one -- but waited until the eight paragraph to not that the tax deduction cap was "implemented by the Trump administration and Congress in 2017."
But in the previous paragraph, she stated that "mass migration has more to do with bad administration on N.Y. Gov. Cuomo’s (D) part than it has to do with tax policies," claiming this was "disclosed" by The Hill. In fact, the Hill article to which Martinez Murcia is referring is not a news article but an opinion piece by "libertarian writer" Kristin Tate.
MRC's Allen West Gets His Facts Wrong on Obama Economy Topic: CNSNews.com
Allen West has a thing for the counterfactual. In his Aug. 19 CNSNews.com column in which he likens "the left" to the Borg from the Star Trek series (something he also has a thing for), the Media Research Center senior fellow wrote:
What is rather hypocritical, as are most things with the progressive, socialist left, was how the media covered for the abysmal economy of Barack Hussein Obama. Obama has gone down in history as the first president since the Great Depression to not achieve year-over-year GDP growth that topped three percent while in office, and we were told by the media that that was the new normal. For eight years, the leftist media told us the Obama economy was the fault of George W. Bush. Even after Obama’s reelection, where he inherited his own failing economy, we were told it was still Bush’s fault. And now, we are being told by the media that Trump’s economic success is because of Barack Obama. Yeah, I am confused as well. And our confusion comes since we all know that is was Obama who mocked Trump for having a “magic wand” to bring jobs back to America and truly grow the economy. And oh, by the way, the great recession of 2008 was the result of an insidious progressive socialist “participation trophy” policy from Jimmy Carter in 1978 called the Community Reinvestment Act. The equality of outcomes mentality of the left believing that every American had a right to own a home led to the economic crisis by way of failed mortgage backed securities and subprime lending.
Hmm, how many times did we hear the leftist media talk about that? Yes, just as many times as we heard them speak about Obamanomics being a blatant Keynesian economic model failure.
First: West conveniently ignores the fact that 3 percent GDP growth hasn't happened under Trump either, as even wildly pro-Trump CNS editor in chief Terry Jeffrey was forced to admit. (Funny how West seems to perceive that usng Obama's middle name is an attempt at an insult.)
Second: West also conveniently omits the fact that 1) Obama took office in the midst of a severe recession, and 2) the overall economy under Obama was far from "abysmal." In fact, monthly job growth under Obama's second term was higher than it is under Trump, while unemployment steadily declined and GDP steadily increased from the depth of the recession under Obama. Indeed, it can be argued that the trendlines show Trump is simply continuing Obama's economic policies.
Third: Allen's claim that that the recession was the "result" of the Community Reinvestment Act is a right-wing falsehood. As Barry Ritholtz writes, the CRA targeted discriminatory lending practices in low-income urban areas, but the risky subprime mortgages that played the biggest role in triggering the financial crisis were mostly in suburban areas, mostly issued by non-bank lenders who weren't subject to the CRA.
By pushing right-wing propaganda that ignores the truth, West has shown who the real member of the Borg is.
CNSNews.com's obsessionwith right-wing radio host Mark Levin (or his guests or guest hosts) and treating pretty much everything he says or does as wisdom from on high that cannot be disputed (and not at all because Brent Bozell, whose Media Research Center runs CNS, is a close buddy of Levin) continues apace. Let's document the atrocities over the past two months, shall we?
That's 21 items for July and August, and a total of 81 items so far in 2018. That's approximately one Levin article every three days at CNS. It seems that only President Trump gets more CNS coverage than Levin.
Flip-Flop: CNS Moves From Light Treatement Of Mueller Report To Harsh Treatment of Comey Topic: CNSNews.com
When the report on Robert Mueller's investigation into President Trump was released, CNSNews.com labored hard to make Trump look good as possible despite it not exactly being a full exoneration for him. By contrast, CNS' reporting on a Department of Justice investigation into former FBI Director James Comey -- which turned up less than on Trump -- was much harsher.
The lead story by Susan Jones emphasized that the DOJ's inspector general "concludes that Comey failed to live up to his responsibility to protect sensitive information; and by using sensitive information to force the appointment of a special prosecutor, the OIG found that Comey "set a dangerous example for the over 35,000 current FBI employees -- and the many thousands more former FBI employees -- who similarly have access to or knowledge of non-public information." The report's key conclusion, that Comey didn't leak classified information and will not face criminal charges, didn't get mentioned until the third paragraph.
Just as CNS lined up Republicans and conservatives to spin away the Mueller report with pro-Trump rah-rah, it lined up many of those same conservatives for some Comey-bashing:
CNS also served up a commentary from the Heritage Foundation's John G. Malcolm repeating those same right-wing attacks.
By contrast, an article by Jones on "liberal" reaction to the Comey report was snarky and dimissive, reacting to one commentator's statement that the last 10 pages of the report are "sort of a howl of rage and anger" by huffing: "In fact, the last ten pages of the report include the IG's conclusion that Comey failed to live up to his responsibility to protect sensitive information; and by using sensitive information to force the appointment of a special prosecutor, the OIG found that Comey 'set a dangerous example for the over 35,000 current FBI employees -- and the many thousands more former FBI employees -- who similarly have access to or knowledge of non-public information.'"
Jones concluded her article with seven paragraphs of copy-and-pasted text from the report "for the record" -- even though that very same text was copy-and-pasted into her lead article, so it was already on the record at CNS.
The August jobs report was disappointing, with only 130,000 jobs created and job-growth numbers from June and July revised downward. This, of course, meant that CNS had to obscure that fact with a raftload of pro-Trump rah-rah. Thus, Susan Jones' lead story begins this way:
The number of people employed in the United States hit a record 157,878,000 in August, the 21st record set under President Donald Trump, according to the employment report released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
That's an increase of 590,000 from the record 157,228,000 employed in July.
The unemployment rate held steady at 3.7 percent. For blacks, the unemployment rate dropped to a record low of 5.5 percent last month. And for Hispanics, the unemployment rate was 4.2 percent in August, which ties the record low set earlier this year.
The fact that only 130,000 jobs were created was buried in the eighth paragraph, and the previous months' downward revisions didn't get mentioned until the following paragraph.
The usual sidebars got added -- Terry Jeffrey's item on manufacturing jobs, which grew so slowly that he instead highlighted that manufacturing jobs are "up 498,000 since President Donald Trump took office, and Craig Bannister's piece on Hispanic employment.
Bannister also served up a snarky item on how House Speaker Nancy Pelosi noting that the economy is "faltering" despite "the U.S. Labor Department’s August report revealing that a record number of people were employed last month, while the unemployment rate held at 3.7% - and fell to record lows for blacks and Hispanics" and that "employment in the U.S. set its 21st record high under Trump in August."
Bannister writes like a man who knows what his bosses want to hear.
NEW ARTICLE: CNS Attacks When Trump Critics Testify Topic: CNSNews.com
CNSNews.com's biased coverage of the congressional testimony of Michael Cohen and John Dean fit its pro-Trump template: trash the speakers and cheer Republicans who bash them while ignoring questioning from Democratic members of Congress. Read more >>
CNS Also Loves The Lazy 'Meathead' Insult of Rob Reiner Topic: CNSNews.com
We'vedocumented how the Media Research Center insists on identifying Rob Reiner as "Meathead" -- an acting role he hasn't played in more than 40 years and despite the fact he has become a director and producer of numerous successful and critically acclaimed movies since -- as a cheap, lazy insult whenever he expresses an opinion it doesn't like.
It turns out the MRC's "news" division, CNSNews.com, embraces that lazy insult as well. An anonymously written Aug. 19 CNS article -- a "news "article, not a blog post -- carries the headline "Rob Reiner (AKA ‘Meathead’): ‘The President of the United States is a Lying Racist Criminal’" and tells us in the lead paragrah that "Actor and director Rob Reiner, who played ‘Meathead’ in the 1970s television program 'All in the Family'" said this.
The article also added that "Reiner frequently issues Tweets attacking Trump," but it did not explain why this particular tweet was somehow more newsworthy than the others. At no point does the anonymous CNS writer dispute Reiner's characterization of Trump, just complain that it was said.
The article is bizarrely illustrated with an 11-year-old photo of Reiner pictured with Hillary Clinton. Didn't Getty Images -- from which CNS pulled that photo -- have any more recent photos of Reiner that would be more timely and relevant? Or is CNS giving up on the pretense that it's different from its MRC parent and is now pushing the same partisan political attacks?
The question has to be asked: Is there any difference between CNS and the MRC anymore, other than the format in which the information is presented?
CNS editor in chief Terry Jeffrey intoned in an Aug. 22 article:
Approximately 64 percent of the arrests that the federal government made in fiscal 2018 were of non-U.S. citizens, according to a report released today by the Justice Department’s Bureau of Justice Statistics.
That represents a dramatic change from just two decades ago, when approximately 63 percent of federal arrests were of citizens and only approximately 37 percent were of non-citizens.
According to the data for fiscal years 1998 through 2018 that the BJS released today, federal arrests of non-U.S. citizen first surpassed federal arrests of citizens in fiscal 2008.
What Jeffrey refused to explicitly report about the increase: it's being driven by the Trump administration’s crackdown on undocumented immigration, not by any notable increase in violent crime. Jeffrey is misleading his readers by touting these inflated numbers.
Jeffrey waited until the fifth paragraph of his article to mention this, then tried to spin it: "Although immigration and immigration-related offenses accounted for the vast majority of non-U.S. citizen arrests, non-citizens were also over-represented among those arrested for non-immigration offenses, according to the report." That spin of attempting to portray non-citizens as violent criminals continued:
“The five crime types for which non-U.S. citizens were most likely to be prosecuted in U.S. district court in 2018 were illegal reentry (72 percent of prosecutions), drugs (13 percent of prosecutions), fraud (4.5 percent), alien smuggling (4 percent), and misuse of visas (2 percent).”
“Non-U.S. citizens, who make up 7 percent of the U.S. population (per the U.S. Census Bureau for 2017), accounted for 15 percent of prosecutions in U.S. district court for non-immigration crimes in 2018,” said the report.
“In 2018,” it said, “non-U.S. citizens accounted for 24 percent of all federal drug arrests and 25 percent of all federal property arrests, including 28 percent of all federal fraud arrests,” said the report.
But as the Cato Institute's Alex Nowrasteh -- who conducted a study finding that non-citizens in the U.S. commit crimes at lower rates than citizens, a finding CNS' owner the Media Research Center tried and failed to discredit -- pointed out, those numbers are straight from the Justice Department and features "the most dramatic statistics displayed without context, nuance, or explanation — not a serious data analysis."
Jeffrey is putting pro-Trump sycophancy ahead of honestly reporting the facts. As CNS does.
CNS Branded Obama As Narcissist, But Trump's 'Chosen One' Claim Is 'Sarcastic' Topic: CNSNews.com
One of the partisan narratives CNSNews.com pushed during the Obama presidency was the President Obama was a narcissist. Not only did it count how many times Obama used the word "I" during his speeches, it ran opinion pieces reinforcing the narrative, for instance:
Despite the fact that Donald Trump has proven to be much more narcissistic than it has ever accused Obama of being, CNS has pargely ignored it. And when Trump does engage in a narcissistic display that can't be ignored, it will try to pass it off as something else.
Thus, an anonymously written Aug. 21 article spinning Trump's "I am the chosen one" claim -- which CNS would immediately brand as narcissistic if it came out of Obama's mouth -- into an example of how he is a leader:
In a press conference outside the White House today, President Donald Trump looked to the sky, spread his arms, and told reporters: “I am the chosen one.”
The president was making the case that he is the one president who has been willing to take on China over the issue of trade.
The headline had a different spin, declaring that "Trump Looks to Sky, Spreads Arms, and Sarcasticlly [sic] Tells Reporters: ‘I Am the Chosen One’" -- portraying the remark as a joke instead of narcissism.
CNS Touts Poll Showing Trump More Admired Than Pope (But Less Than 13 Other People) Topic: CNSNews.com
How much of a Trump sycophant is CNSNews.com? Check out this anonymously written Aug. 6 blog post with the gushy headline "Global Survey: Donald Trump More Admired Than Pope Francis."
That point is rehashed in the lead paragraph: "A survey of more than 42,000 people in 41 different countries conducted by YouGov.com revealed that President Donald Trump is more admired than Pope Francis." That emphasis would seem to be a subtle dig at the pope, whom the right-wing Catholic CNS editors think they can lecture to about Catholicism.
From the way the headline and first paragraph are written, you would think that Trump and the pope were the top two vote-getters in the poll. As the article eventually admits, neither of them were even in the top 10:
However, Trump is not as admired as Bill Gates—who proved to be the most admired man in the world—or former President Barack Obama who was the second most admired man in the world.
In fact, Trump ranked fourteenth and Pope Francis ranked fifteenth.
According to the survey, Chinese President Xi Jinping, who ranked fourth, and Russian President Vladimir Putin, who ranked tenth, were also more admired than Trump and Pope Francis.
That's right -- CNS thought the 14th most-admired man was more worthy of an article than the other 13.
CNS Remains Obsessed With Peter Strzok's Sex Life Topic: CNSNews.com
We've documented how CNSNews.com has a particular obsession with the sex life of former FBI agent Peter Strzok, repeatedly pointing out that tweets critical of Donald Trump were issued while he was having an affair with a fellow agent. The obsession hasn't stopped.
An Aug. 9 CNS article by Susan Jones on Strzok's lawsuit claiming he was fired from his FBI because of pressure from Trump and not job performance managed to reference his sex life twice:
The lawsuit filed by former FBI counterintelligence agent Peter Strzok says he was unlawfully fired from the FBI on August 9, 2018, as the result of "unrelenting pressure from President Trump and his political allies in Congress and the media."
The lawsuit states: "The campaign to fire Strzok included constant tweets and other disparaging statements by the President, as well as direct appeals from the President to then Attorney General Jefferson Sessions and FBI Director Christopher Wray to fire Strzok, which were chronicled in the press."
Strzok, during his extra-marital affair with FBI attorney Lisa Page, sent hundreds of text messages to Page, some of them sharply critical of then-candidate Donald Trump and his supporters. At the time, Strzok was supervising the FBI's investigation into Hillary Clinton's private email server.
[...]
"During his long and distinguished career in the FBI, Special Agent Strzok worked on (and in many cases led) some of the most high profile and sensitive investigations in recent history," the lawsuit states.
The lawsuit does not mention that he was working on some of those highly sensitive investigations while carrying on an adulterous affair with fellow FBI employee Lisa Page, a potentially compromising situation for a chief counterintelligence agent.
By contrast, as we've noted, Jones refused for days to even name the woman to whom Trump paid hush money to during the 2016 election and -- unlike with Strzok -- never attacked Trump for having the apparent affair in the frist place, since "Trump's womanizing hardly comes as a shock to the American people"; instead, she bashed Stormy Daniels for talking about it.
CNS Shills For Border Patrol, ICE Topic: CNSNews.com
As Border Patrol and immigration officials have come under increased scrutiny over the Trump administration's crackdown on refugees and other undocumented immigrants and how they are treated in custody, as well as tweets from President Trump widely viewed as anti-immigrant, CNSNews.com -- already a loyal Trump stenographer -- increased the sycophancy over the past couple months by with a notable uptick in articles defending ICE and CBP and atacking their critics, usually in the form of favorable testimony by administration officials or Republican congressmen:
Meanwhile, CNS also made time to make political attacks over immigration, such as an article by Melanie Arter complaining that "House Democrats refuse to pass legislation that might slow the overwhelming tide of illegal immigration at the nation's Southwest border, but today they will find time to vote on a resolution formally condemning President Donald Trump for his 'xenophobic tweets.'"
Just a reminder of what CNS' priorities are ... and they aren't news.
CNSNews.com managing editor Michael W. Chapman has occasionally invoked violence in Chicago when it suited his right-wing agenda. For instance, in 2016 he featured spotlight-loving Wisconsin sheriff David Clarke touting how "there have been 455 murders in Chicago so far this year, which is greater than the 270 coalition soldiers killed in Afghanistan since 2013." Given how Clarke has since abruptly resigned from his sheriff amid lawsuits and became so toxic and extreme that even the Trump administration wouldn't hire him and Fox News barred him from appearing on the channel, this one hasn't aged too well. Chapman also wrote about Chicago violence a few times in 2017 and 2018, and he hadn't written about it at all for the first seven months of 2019.. 
CNSNews.com editor in chief Terry Jeffrey's 
Craig Bannister was in full pro-Trump stenography mode in a Sept. 10 CNSNews.com 
Apparently, CNSNews.com doesn't view immigrants as fully human.
Allen West 
CNSNews.com's 
When the report on Robert Mueller's investigation into President Trump was released, CNSNews.com 
The August jobs report 
We've
CNS editor in chief Terry Jeffrey intoned in an Aug. 22 
One of the partisan narratives CNSNews.com pushed during the Obama presidency was the President Obama was a narcissist. Not only did it 
How much of a Trump sycophant is CNSNews.com? Check out this anonymously written Aug. 6 
We've 
As Border Patrol and immigration officials have come under increased scrutiny over the Trump administration's crackdown on refugees and other undocumented immigrants and how they are treated in custody, as well as tweets from President Trump widely viewed as anti-immigrant, CNSNews.com -- already a loyal Trump stenographer -- increased the sycophancy over the past couple months by with a notable uptick in articles defending ICE and CBP and atacking their critics, usually in the form of favorable testimony by administration officials or Republican congressmen:
