-By Warner Todd Huston
Would you like to see how the left-wing media spins stories to make Republicans look like the bad guys? You need look no farther than the spin Roll Call put on a story about Vice President Mike Pence replying to liberal demands that the Department of Immigration and Customs Enforcement be abolished.
For several weeks, now, a growing list of left-wing Democrats have lighted upon a new campaign issue and have begun braying to “abolish ICE.” This week the Trump administration has finally begun to push back against the outrageous demand. President Trump mentioned the left’s push to eliminate one of our chief immigration enforcement agencies at a rally in Montana. But VP Pence also spoke about it from Washington on Friday.
Pretending to report on Pence’s comments, the DC-based newspaper Roll Call jumped to the story with a Friday piece entitled, “Pence to Democrats: Stop ‘Spurious Attacks on ICE.”
The very first paragraph of this laughable excuse for news is a master class in left-wing spin all aimed at making Pence look like the bad guy.
Here it is:
Vice President Mike Pence on Friday continued the White House’s efforts to make a controversial border security agency known as ICE a major midterm election issue, saying it arrests “criminal illegal aliens” who are “poisoning our youth.”
There are a number of lies, half truths, and liberal spin here:
First there is this: “Pence… continued the White House’s efforts to make a controversial border security agency known as ICE a major midterm election issue…”
This is all essentially a lie. Neither Pence nor Trump has “made” this an issue. It was the Democrats who brought this “abolish ICE” idea to the forefront as a campaign issue. Pence was just responding to the left’s proclamation. Sure, it may become a “campaign issue” for the right, but it is not an issue that Trump created, it is one the liberals made.
Secondly, notice how Roll Call says ICE is a “controversial border security agency”? Says who? There isn’t a thing “controversial” about ICE… except in the minds of liberals. So, what Roll Call did, here, is take the left’s assumption that ICE is “controversial” in order to label ICE as “controversial.”
In other words, it would be like accepting the opinion of the one person on the planet who hates vanilla ice cream and then writing a story that labels vanilla ice cream as the “much hated flavor.” No one hates vanilla but the one guy, yet suddenly vanilla ice cream is “hated.”
Finally, even as it is actually quoting Pence who said ICE arrests “criminal illegal aliens” who are “poisoning our youth,” the way it is written is also meant to cause readers to hate Pence for possibly making a false claim.
But, it really is ICE’s job to arrest criminal illegal aliens. So, even though Pence used that term, Roll Call should not have placed the scare quotes around the term because Pence isn’t making a claim with that phrase. He was asserting a fact. Now, “poisoning our youth” is certainly a quote, so the use of quote marks was warranted there.
So, the net effect of that first paragraph is one lie after another all shaded to make Pence look bad. Contrary to Roll Call’s first paragraph, the Administration did NOT create any “midterm election issue,” ICE is NOT a “controversial agency,” and arresting “criminal illegal aliens” is NOT a scary, possibly false claim, but ICE’s actual job.
This is how the liberal media works. They abuse our language to lie to readers all in order to shade the “news” as a way to attack the right.
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“The only end of writing is to enable the reader better to enjoy life, or better to endure it.”
–Samuel Johnson
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Warner Todd Huston is a Chicago based freelance writer. He has been writing news, opinion editorials and social criticism since early 2001 and before that wrote articles on U.S. history for several American history magazines. Huston is a featured writer for Andrew Breitbart’s Breitbart News, and he appears on such sites as RightWingNews.com, CanadaFreePress.com, YoungConservatives.com, and many, many others. Huston has also appeared on Fox News, Fox Business Network, CNN, and many local TV shows as well as numerous talk radio shows throughout the country.
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