(August 10) CNN’s Brianna Keilar is a habitual practitioner of cheap-shot screeds against conservatives, but her Aug. 8 report on illegal immigration (and a subsequent tweet) outstripped her own usual level of character assassination — especially against former House Speaker Newt Gingrich.
“President Biden has a border crisis on his hands – no doubt,” she tweeted on Aug 9 . “But conservatives are capitalizing on it by demonizing immigrants as diseased spreaders of covid – with no facts to back that up. #RollTheTape.” Included was a nine-minute segment from her CNN report from the day before.
As my colleague Tiana Lowe convincingly explained on Aug. 9, the tweet was bad enough. No facts? Then why did CBS This Morning, hardly a conservative program, run a lengthy segment on Aug. 10 with the chyron explicitly saying “COVID Crisis at the Border?” Mayor Javier Villalobos of McAllen, Texas, said far too many coronavirus-infected illegal immigrants are “going out” into his community, “and we have no authority to stop it.”
As Axios reported on July 27, “About 50,000 migrants who crossed the southern border illegally have now been released in the United States without a court date. Although they are told to report to an Immigration and Customs Enforcement office instead, just 13% have shown up so far.” And “it’s unprecedented for agents to release migrants without an official notice to appear in court.”…
Still, what was far, far worse than her misstatement of facts was how she outlandishly vilified Gingrich….
Then came the worst, a calumny so inexcusable that Gingrich may think it approaches the legal definition of defamation. As frightening video ran on-screen, Keilar directly likened Gingrich’s comments to the white supremacist marchers who desecrated Charlottesville, Virginia, in 2017, and to mass murderers in Pittsburgh in 2018 and El Paso in 2019.
Yeah, that’s right: According to CNN, Gingrich is a fellow traveler with mass murderers…. [The full column is at this link.]
