After Propping Up Biden’s Staged Border Visit, NPR Frames McCarthy’s Trip As A ‘Photo Op’
Coverage of Kevin McCarthy’s first trip to the border this week since becoming House speaker provided just the latest example of how the corrupt corporate media provide vastly different treatment to Republicans and Democrats to advance the agendas of the latter.
On Thursday, NPR — which has a history of running PR campaigns for Democrats, yet receives taxpayer funding — published a clip from its “All Things Considered” podcast with a headline questioning whether McCarthy’s visit to the U.S.-Mexico border was “nothing more than a photo op.”
“House Speaker Kevin McCarthy led a congressional delegation to southern Arizona today to address concerns along the U.S.-Mexico border. But critics say this visit is nothing more than a photo op,” podcast host Ailsa Chang said.
The headline for the coverage of McCarthy’s border visit is noticeably different from the one NPR used last month to cover President Joe Biden’s first verifiable visit to the southern border in his 50 years in public office.
“Biden visits U.S.-Mexico border for 1st time as president,” the January “All Things Considered” headline said.
During the short clip, the podcast host asked NPR International Correspondent Eyder Peralta about Biden’s visit to El Paso, Texas, to which Peralta began his response by utilizing legacy media’s infamous “Republicans pounce!” framing to make it appear as if the ongoing border crisis is nothing but manufactured outrage by the GOP.
“Republicans have been criticizing the president for not visiting the border, and in their eyes, he was ignoring the humanitarian crisis there. So today he went there to tour some facilities and talk to some border agents, and he even took a tour of the border wall,” Peralta said. “The governor of Texas, Greg Abbott, didn’t seem very happy about the visit.”
At no point in the clip did Peralta or the podcast host bother to mention that prior to Biden’s arrival, immigration authorities cleared out many of the migrant encampments in the areas the president would be visiting. As The Federalist’s Tristan Justice reported, Customs and Border Protection sources “described a ‘sanitized and orderly’ situation presented to the president, clouding the severity of the crisis.”
[READ: McCarthy Begins To Build Case For Mayorkas Impeachment]
As a result of Biden’s open-border policies, illegal immigration has skyrocketed along the U.S.-Mexico border over the past two years of his presidency. In fiscal year 2022 alone, 2.3 million illegal aliens were apprehended by Border Patrol officials, with 1.7 million captured in 2021. These figures don’t even include the hundreds of thousands of known “gotaways,” whom immigration authorities were not able to apprehend due to a “lack of manpower.”
But rather than focus on how Biden has wildly exacerbated the disaster, leftist “news” organizations such as NPR would rather play political games to score bonus points with their ideological cohorts in Congress. To them, the lives of the overwhelmed Border Patrol agents, Americans living along the border, and the migrants risking their lives trying to come to the U.S. mean nothing.
All that matters is maintaining the Democrat-preferred narrative at all costs.
[WATCH: Cartel Country: The Untold Story Of America’s Black Market On The Border]
Shawn Fleetwood is a Staff Writer for The Federalist and a graduate of the University of Mary Washington. He also serves as a state content writer for Convention of States Action and his work has been featured in numerous outlets, including RealClearPolitics, RealClearHealth, and Conservative Review. Follow him on Twitter @ShawnFleetwood
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