Along with Donald Trump and its fellow right-wingers, The Media Research Center was quick to exploit claims of a Venezuelan gang called Tren de Aragua reportedly causing trouble in Aurora, Colo. Jorge Bonilla kicked things off in an Aug. 29 post:
If a violent transnational gang coming over the border and overrunning a Denver suburb doesn’t get covered in the national news media, did it really happen at all? This appears to be the underlying calculus of the Regime Media’s outright refusal to cover a story that is critically adverse to the electoral prospects of Vice President Kamala Harris.
[…]Tren de Aragua has become something of a household name as of late, with a history of criming all over the nation including, most notoriously, the murder of University of Georgia nursing student Laken Riley. But the taking of Aurora, or significant parts of the city including entire apartment complexes, is unprecedented. Its gross non-coverage stands as one of the worst instances of media bias by omission in recent memory, and that’s saying a lot.
The calculus for continued non-coverage of Aurora by ABC, CBS, NBC, Univision, and Telemundo is simple. Aurora is the rotten fruit of Biden-Harris border policy and the Border Czar, now at the top of the ticket, simply cannot be made to look bad. Wouldn’t be joyous.
At Univision and Telemundo, with their dependence on broken borders for a continuous inflow of viewers, it’s about a general refusal to cover stories that reflect poorly on open-borders policies such as those enacted by Biden-Harris. In those cases, immigration policy is a Precious that must also be protected along with the Democrat du jour.
Because Aurora is a localized event that impacts national policy, the story gets relegated to “local crime story”, not unlike the trial of mass murdering abortionist Kermit Gosnell– a far more horrendous story than Aurora for different reasons but that nonetheless reflects poorly on a core Democrat policy and might trigger an adverse electoral reaction among the electorate from whom the story was suppressed.
Thanks, Jorge, for making it clear that you care only about the story helping your right-wing political narratives and that you would ignore it if it didn’t.
Bonilla hyped it again in a Sept. 2 post whining that ABC’s “This Week” didn’t ask Colorado Gov. Jared Polis about “the violent takeover of certain parts of Aurora, Colorado by the violent Tren de Aragua gang.”
Despite this purportedly being a huge story, Bonilla then ignored it for nearly three weeks (though a Sept. 9 post by Curtis Houck touted a right-wing reporter hyping it on Fox News with “our friend, Trace Gallagher”). Why? This alarmist narrative isn’t exactly true. The city’s (Republican) mayor and other city officials point out that the city has not been overrun by gangs, and what problem there is has been limited to specific properties. It turns out the main issue appears to be negligence and mismanagement by an out-of-state landlord that let apartment properties fall into disrepair, creating conditions that allowed gangs to take over.
Rather than choosing to address this background that does not necessarily benefit his partisan narrative, Bonilla continued to cling to that increasingly dubious narrative when he finally touched on it again in a Sept. 22 post:
CBS Face the Nation and vice presidential debate moderator Margaret Brennan tossed Colorado Governor and Kamala Harris surrogate Jared Polis a huge lifeline when engaging the issue of violent transnational gang Tren de Aragua’s (TdA) activities in Aurora, a Denver suburb.
Watch as Polis fumbles around with a response to the TdA question before getting bailed out, and then pivoting to the failed border deal[.] […]
On the one hand, Brennan asked the question that Regime Media has thus far avoided asking: the Aurora question. It remains to be seen whether this question gets asked on its own in the vice presidential debate, or whether it gets lumped in with Springfield.
On the other, Brennan tossed Polis a lifeline after his initial word salad of a response. An inconvenient fact that often escapes Regime and Regime Media analyses of the migrant crisis: by the time discussions of the failed border deal began in earnest most illegal migrants, if not the vast majority, had already crossed the border and made it into the interior of the United States. Social media is awash with videos of suspected TdA types bragging about the ease with which they made it into the United States back in 2021 and 2022.
Polis took Brennan’s guidance and spun to the failed border deal before the interview ended with a question about affordable housing. But not before giving us insights both into how the Aurora question might get asked at the debate, and into the Colorado governor’s disconnect with this key issue ahead of the election.
Meanwhile, Bonilla demonstrated his disconnect with the facts. He then spent a Sept. 26 post complaining that a news report on the situation accurately quoted city officials pointing that reality doesn’t fit the right-wing narrative:
We have previously defined “Trumpwashing” as the Regime Media’s established practice of willfully sitting on a story until such a time as it can be reported in a Trump-adverse angle. Case in point: Springfield, Ohio, which the media didn’t care about until after the second presidential debate. The media are now trying to Trumpwash Aurora, Colorado.
The Regime Media have been notoriously silent about the activities of violent transnational gang Tren de Aragua (TdA) in the Denver suburb. Or anywhere else, for that matter. As we’ve noted, Univision and Telemundo have consistently been the only national over-the-air newscasts to cover TdA. Until now.
[…]Think about it: the story is Chernobyl-level toxic to the presidential aspirations of Kamala Harris; proof evident of the current administration’s failures on border policy. Each new report would expose viewers to the idea that the Biden Administration threw open the border and allowed tens of millions of illegal migrants into the country with no vetting.
And so it is that Tren de Aragua in Aurora, which has been the subject of significant reporting, draws Regime Media silence until such a time as there is a Trump rhetorical exaggeration of some sort that can be cited as the factual basis for “targeting” of some sort. Correspondent Gabe Gutierrez performs the Trumpwashing, with each of the now-standard elements: the local who is freaked out that her citizen reporting went viral, the migrant saying no such thing is happening, and the concerned local official.
The story is only “Chernobyl-level toxic” if you ignore the actual facts and hide them from readers, like Bonilla did. He didn’t explain why he’s so mad that Trump was exposed spreading yet another lie. And Bonilla’s concern about Springfield omits that Bonilla praised Trump and J.D. Vance lying about Haitians eating pets because, yet, it advanced the correct partisan narrative.
Speaking of Vance, Mark Finkelstein praised him for spreading the distorted narrative in an Oct. 12 post:
When confronted by hostile members of the liberal media, J.D. Vance has demonstrated an almost otherwordly ability to keep his cool and make his case cogently.
Witness Vance’s performance on ABC’s This Week. Host Martha Raddatz was attacking Trump, and by extension Vance, over statements Trump had made about apartment complexes in Aurora, Colorado being invaded by violent migrant gangs.
As Vance began to reply, Raddatz tried to cut him off, saying “I’m going to stop you. The incidents were limited to a handful of apartment complexes.”
Bad move, Martha!
Retorted Vance:
“Martha — do you hear yourself? Only a ‘handful‘ of apartment complexes in America were taken over by Venezuelan gangs, and Donald Trump is the problem, and not Kamala Harris’ open border? . . . You seem to be more focused with nitpicking everything that Donald Trump has said, rather than acknowledging that apartment complexes in the United States of America are being taken over by violent gangs.”
It was game, set, and match. Raddatz should have cried “no mas” and cut her losses, but made the mistake of trying to score a point in ending the segment: “Let’s just end that with they did not invade or take over the city.”
Vance struck back with some savory sarcasm: “Just a few apartment complexes, no big deal.”
Finkelstein made sure not to mention the negligent management of the complexes that allowed the situation to happen. Narrative over truth, remember?