The days of Journo-List never ended; they simply shifted to another platform in order to coordinate news items across the media landscape. Journo-List was an online forum where members of the news media were invited to work out what should be the prevailing narratives in their reporting. Ezra Klein began the exclusive group that eventually numbered into the hundreds, and he bragged about how he purposefully excluded conservative voices.
The media coordination is no less evident today. As I have covered in my daily media column, we have recently seen organized messaging from the press insisting that generations of measurements of a recession need to be tossed out on behalf of Joe Biden. Now, the next choreographed narrative concerns the act of governors from border states bussing immigrants into cities such as New York and Washington, D.C. This has sparked some controversy, and the Biden administration – seemingly content with letting Texas and Arizona grapple with floods of new arrivals – has led the gripe brigade in the press.
As Mayors Muriel Bowser and Eric Adams have recently taken to the microphones to express displeasure over these imports, the unspoken irony is the sympathy they garner over being overwhelmed and under-supplied to handle the influx that has not been present prior. Border states have dealt with a greater challenge in far smaller cities almost from when Joe Biden was elected, and the media has been mostly muted.
Now, suddenly it is a problem and one that many outlets agree upon in regards to the cause.
In one of the receiving cities, The Washington Post states, "The Migrant Busses Sent to D.C. Are a Cruel Political Stunt." Maybe one word left off of this judgment is "successful," as the press has at least finally been coaxed into at least covering the issue.
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Following suit, in the other city, The New York Times declares, "GOP Governors Cause Havoc By Bussing Migrants to East Coast." The implication is that hundreds of thousands streaming across our border every month for at least a year have not caused havoc in Texas and Arizona. But sharing a few thousand refugees with major metropolitan centers is considered "a political tactic."
At NPR, they took four reporters to charge those governors for delivering their shipments, "With No Plan For What's Next." The accusation, of course, has to overlook the lengthy period the Biden administration has delivered little in the way of a plan in the border communities. MSNBC announced that Gov. Abbot was not doing this in an effort to underscore the problem and seek relief. "The Republican governor's plan centers on creating high-profile controversies involving the border to gin up outrage, and use that outrage to his political benefit."
CBS News gave Mayor Bowser a platform to carp about the arrivals. Vanity Fair amazingly excused Joe Biden entirely as they strained to claim the "GOP Governors Have Successfully Created a Migrant Crisis."
This desperation in the media to excuse the administration for its self-created crisis manages to create the opposite effect. In attempting to blame the Republicans, the reporting has to include the very real issues faced in those border states. The unspoken irony – the complaints today are being leveled by mayors from cities that had proudly declared themselves as Sanctuary Cities.
Now, when facing the very real effects of those boasts, they complain loudly – while dealing with a fraction of the problem that border towns have been wrestling with for over a year.
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