It used to take at least a full news cycle for the deceitful spin, visuals, and headlines from the mainstream media to become apparent. But that was last week; e.g. when we discovered via LU contributor Rusty Weiss that a little boy shown in a video, crying in a “cage,” was being used to stage a protest. He wasn’t actually in a cage. His heart-rending sobs were not those of a child separated from his parents.
Unscrupulous media nevertheless ran the video as if it showed a child actually in detention, separated from his parents.
Now, however, it seems that deceitful imagery and wording from the media are being exposed at the very same time they come out.
Will this presidential election be the most important in American history?
It’s like having a steady stream of corrective captions on an Orwellian barrage of Newspeak communications. E.g. (just to make something up):
[Recognized news source] “We are at war with Oceania.”
[Caption] He’s lying. We are not at war with Oceania.
This is a weird sensation. And it’s going to be hard to beat today’s instance of Orwellian untruth.
As Howard Portnoy noted, MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow got us warmed up on Tuesday evening with a bout of, well, artistic-looking tears during the reading of a news story about family separation.
Then, on Thursday, TIME magazine debuted its latest cover — captured in our feature image — which shows President Trump towering over a little girl from a now-viral photo, crying her eyes out at a border facility. The image of the child has been everywhere, exemplifying the undoubted distress in which little children are being placed by continued illegal border crossings.
The media gave considerable air time to the new TIME cover on Thursday. (CNN’s coverage is typical.) NBC News offered this temperate, judicious commentary:
Time’s previous covers have portrayed Trump in a variety of ways, including one from earlier in June in which Trump saw himself in the mirror as a king. No other cover, however, has so plainly questioned the morality of a Trump policy in a visual context.
Many journalists have pointed out that the separation of immigrant families is a policy owned by the Trump administration. But with its new cover, Time puts the issue, quite literally, at Trump’s feet.
ABC did acknowledge that the photographer, Getty’s John Moore, didn’t actually see the mother and child separated. The little girl started crying when she was set down for a few moments.
Moore, who as a photojournalist has been covering the U.S.-Mexico border for a decade, said he did not see the pair separated but that policy at the time would indicate their separation.
“All that happens behind closed doors… We’ll never see that,” he told ABC News.
The ABC story was published at 12:26 Eastern time on 21 June 2018. At 13:47 Eastern, the Daily Mail, which bothered to find the family in Honduras, reported that the little girl’s father said the mother and toddler were never separated.
In fact, the mother had set out with the child on her own, some three weeks ago, and the father, 32-year-old Denis Javier Varela Hernandez, hadn’t known where they were until he saw them on the news in Texas.
In an exclusive interview with DailyMail.com, Hernandez, who lives in Puerto Cortes, Honduras, says that he was told yesterday that his wife and child are being detained at a family residential center in Texas but are together and are doing ‘fine.’
‘You can imagine how I felt when I saw that photo of my daughter. It broke my heart. It’s difficult as a father to see that, but I know now that they are not in danger. They are safer now than when they were making that journey to the border,’ he said.
Denis said his wife and daughter were never separated by border control agents and remain together.
According to Hernandez, he and his wife differed on whether she should try to migrate to the U.S. Hernandez has a job at a local port and wanted to stay put. His wife, Sandra, had a different plan.
He revealed that his wife had previously mentioned her wish to go to the United States for a ‘better future’ but did not tell him nor any of their family members that she was planning to make the trek.
‘I didn’t support it. I asked her, why? Why would she want to put our little girl through that? But it was her decision at the end of the day.’
He said that Sandra had always wanted to experience ‘the American dream’ and hoped to find a good job in the States.
Denis, who works as a captain at a port on the coast of Puerto Cortes, explained that things back home were fine but not great, and that his wife was seeking political asylum.
From where we sit, the American public is not in a position to judge whether she should be granted asylum. Our federal infrastructure will have to make that determination.
Moreover, it would be wrong to proclaim that all asylum cases are like this one; i.e., involving people who seem to be coming from relatively safe, employed backgrounds without immediate threats to their welfare. This case doesn’t demonstrate anything about statistics, or the validity of the family separation problem.
But that level of scrupulous honesty is manifestly very different from what we’re getting from the mainstream media. For today, the “truth captions” have spoken.
