The Media Research Center loves freaking out about immigrant crime, even when the statistics don’t support it. Still, the MRC loves to capitalize on the misery of others to push the scary-brown-person narrative, and its big story this year involved the death of Laken Riley, killed by an undocumented immigrant — so big, in fact, that the MRC got nearly a year’s worth of exploitative content out of her. Riley made her first appearance as a narrative tool to exploit in a Feb. 24 post by Alex Christy:
The big three networks of ABC, NBC, and CBS had three underwhelming, yet widely varying approaches to the news that a released illegal immigrant has been charged with the murder of a Georgia college student on the respective editions of Good Morning America, Today and CBS Saturday Mornings. ABC mentioned the illegal immigrant part, but not the released part. NBC mentioned the murder but omitted the illegal immigrant angle, and CBS ignored the story altogether.
On Friday’s Evening News, CBS did manage to do a report on the subject with Mark Strassman reporting that “Late this afternoon, police announced they had a murder suspect in custody but gave no other details. Friday felt different here, edgy for many. All day police scoured this apartment complex, and Friday classes were canceled.”
However, not only was no update given in the morning, but the story itself was ignored.
[…]Certainly, a good portion of the reports were appropriately spent honoring the victim, who was a nursing student on the dean’s list, but is one sentence mentioning that Ibarra is an illegal immigrant who crossed the border in El Paso and released because of a lack of detention space too much to ask for?
The next day, by contrast, Brad Wilmouth praised Fox News for adhering to the required partisan talking points:
After the other networks mostly failed to inform viewers that an illegal alien was arrested for allegedly murdering a young nursing student in Georgia, Fox on Saturday gave the story thorough coverage, informing viewers that the Joe Biden administration had released the Venezuelan national after he crossed the southern border into the U.S. illegally in 2022.
On Fox & Friends Saturday, contributor Tom Homan made two appearances on the show and helped break the news that the suspect, Jose Antonio Ibarra, crossed the border illegally in September 2022 but was released in spite of federal law that mandates detention under such circumstances.
NIcholas Fondacaro used a Feb. 26 post to complain that Republicans were called out for exploiting Riley’s death for partisan reasons:
After the liberal media initially refused to report that the murderer of University of Georgia student Laken Hope Riley was an illegal immigrant who was arrested multiple times, we have now reached the phase of the coverage where Republicans noticing the problem was the concerning issue of the story. That seemed to be the reaction CNN’s Jake Tapper had during Monday’s The Lead when he whined that “Republicans [were], obviously, seizing on this horrific tragedy.”
[…]Later in the program, he whined that Republicans were citing the murder as a reason to get border security under control. “So, Republicans, obviously, seizing on this horrific tragedy at the University of Georgia. This girl, this nursing student, killed by an undocumented Venezuelan migrant. And they’re seizing on this as an example of Biden’s failure to protect the American people, to secure the border,” he decried as if this wasn’t the result of failed liberal border policies.
Then it was time to play whataboutism:
Former “Republican strategist,” Doug Heye kvetched that “politics enter these things very quickly. And Donald Trump knows how to take advantage of a situation like this and exploit it.”
If that’s the case, Tapper could be credibly accused of seizing on the Parkland school shooting in 2019 in order to push gun control and attack Senator Marco Rubio (R-FL) and gun rights advocate Dana Loesch with his so-called “town hall” event. He even got a little award for his little show trial against them.
Fondacaro spread a lie about that town hall, repeating a questioner’s false claim that CNN demanded that he ask a scripted question. Even after the questioner’s father admitted that he altered emails to support the false claim, Fondacaro never corrected the record or apologized for lying to his readers.
Clay Waters followed up with a Feb. 29 post complaining that PBS host Amna Nawaz “made a politicized pivot to chide Fox News, suggesting ‘conservatives and right-wing media’ were unfairly seizing on Laken Riley’s murder to promote their anti-immigration views, airing a Fox clip featuring anchor Jesse Watters.” When a commentator noted that “immigrants do not engage in more crime than native-born counterparts, and immigration actually can cause crime to go down, rather than up, so quite contrary to public perception,” Waters huffed that “one could argue being in the country illegally is a crime in itself.” But standing on the wrong side of a line is not a violent crime.
Bill D’Agostino similarly whined in a March 1 compilation post that the “Republicans pounce” strategy was called out:
The horrific murder of college student Laken Riley in Athens, Georgia last week has resulted in some of the most inhuman political coverage imaginable from our news media. Corporate journalists have spent the week wringing their hands about the resulting “backlash” against illegal aliens, and scoffing at Republicans for “seizing” on this tragedy — by calling for policy changes that could have prevented it.
[…]The news media know the border is a losing issue for their favorite political party. Thus far, they’ve been dealing with it by obfuscating as much of the damage caused by America’s open border as possible. But it looks like that’s not working anymore, and instead they’ve fallen back to accusing critics of xenophobia and feigning outrage whenever anyone to the right of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez talks about crime perpetrated by illegal aliens.
D’Agostino offered no evidence that anyone in his video compilation has ever identified the Democrats as their “favorite political party.”