The Media Research Center’s Alex Christy complained in a Sept. 28 post:
On Friday, ICE revealed that it estimates there are roughly 13,000 non-citizen murderers running loose in the country, but only NBC found time to mention it on their Friday evening newscast. ABC and CBS, meanwhile, not only failed to cover it, but tried to spin the border situation as positive.
But it wasn’t well until the end of his post that Christy, summarizing the report by NBC correspondent Gabe Gutierrez, grudgingly conceded an inconvenient fact that undercuts his narrative:
Gutierrez, however, tried to shield Harris from at least some embarrassment, “A source familiar with the data tells NBC News, many entered the country prior to the Biden administration and that ICE lacks resources.”
Christy concluded by trying to spin the stat to right-wing benefit anyway: “With ICE’s report, maybe the media can stop pretending like illegal immigrant crime is no big deal, but that would require two of the three networks to acknowledge the report.”
The next day, Jorge Bonilla similarly started by hyping the big flashy number in praising right-wing Fox News for reporting it:
One can determine whether a piece of information is damaging to Democrats in power. Judging by the Sunday shows’ response to reports that over 13,000 illegal aliens convicted of murder were released into the interior of the United States: extremely damaging.
[…]Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute presented the data consistent with Fox’s reporting, including the point about the numbers not being exclusive to this administration. Nonetheless, NBC’s Kristen Welker felt compelled to firefight the data, almost reflexively, and pivot off of that and on to the upcoming vice presidential debate:
Bonilla grudgingly admitted that even Pletka put the numbers in their factual context — though he refused to point out the right-wing bias of her employer — then whined that others did as well before trying to apply his preferred partisan spin:
Pletka correctly noted both that the data went back decades, and that the non-detained docket DOUBLED under Biden-Harris. Nonetheless, [NBC’s Kristen] Welker felt the need to jump in and hammer the point about the data going back four decades before moving on to the debate.
[…] [CNN host] Jake Tapper, like Kristen Welker, had the fact-check at the ready. Graham takes a different course of action than did Pletka, pivoting to those criminal aliens that were released to the non-detained docket under the Biden-Harris Administration, including the man who killed Georgia nursing student Laken Riley- who reportedly has ties to the murderous Tren de Aragua gang that has established multiple beachheads across several U.S. cities.Somehow, the Regime Media seem to believe that one cannot cite these data because they span a period of time well before Biden-Harris. This doesn’t magically make these data go away, no matter what Welker and Tapper may want to make viewers believe.
More than anything, they are proof evident of a broken immigration system that has been systematically smashed over the past three and a half years. This is what the data actually show, no matter how much the Regime Media may want to make you believe otherwise.
Bonilla, of course, had been spreading bogus fearmongering about Tren de Aragua purportedly taking over a Colorado town.
Geoffrey Dickens was also angry that this right-wing talking point collapsed when hit by reality:
On September 27, ICE revealed that it estimates there are roughly 13,000 non-citizen murderers running loose in the country, but of the three (ABC, CBS, NBC) broadcast networks only NBC found time to mention it on the September 27 Nightly News and on Sunday’s edition of Meet the Press.
It should be noted the mention on Meet the Press (made by Danielle Pletka of the American Enterprise Institute) was immediately “fact-checked” by moderator Kristen Welker: “And DHS has said some of those stats actually go back as far as 40 years.”
But at least the stat got airtime on NBC.
[…]The September 30 print edition (September 29 online version here) of the Washington Post covered the 13,000 number on page 2 but only did so to trash Donald Trump in an article headlined: “Trump Skews Data in Ice Letter to Lambaste Immigrants.”
The fact that ABC and CBS still refuse to report on the number shows how far they are willing to go to cover for the Biden-Harris administration.
None of these MRC writers explained why the full details about that statistic should be hidden from Americans, even if it undercut their preferred right-wing narrative. And if a small minority of those alleged murderers were released under Biden, how can failing to report that statistic equal “cover for the Biden-Harris administration”? That just underscores how desperate the MRC has been hurl dubious claims at Kamala Harris in order to undermine her campaign — which would seem to be the opposite of genuine “media research.”