Chief of Staff Ron Klain retweeted this last night but I haven’t heard much discussion of it today:
It appears that the problem was temporary as the Biden administration was trying to get staffed up and deal with the problem. Which they are trying to do. (It might have been helpful if the Trump administration had been doing something other than screech about the election during the final two months of their term — and let the Biden team have a transition.)
Anyway, in case you are wondering why all the polls are showing a vast majority of the country seeing Biden as a failure already on this issue, check out this analysis at Media Matters. The mainstream media need to take heed:
Since the election of President Joe Biden in November, a right-wing media ecosystem of both Fox News and right-leaning Facebook pages has dominated the national conversation on immigration. CNN, MSNBC, and left-leaning pages eventually followed in the steps of these conservative actors, most notably when attention turned to the increase in migration at the southern border in late February and early March.
According to Media Matters’ internal database, although Fox has steadily misinformed about immigration since the 2020 election, the network’s immigration programming began to significantly spike near Biden’s inauguration, relentlessly increasing through March. Fox fearmongering on immigration issues has been consistently xenophobic, biased, and inaccurate, culminating in the recent whole-hearted and unapologetic embrace of the white supremacist “replacement” conspiracy theory.
CNN and MSNBC largely ignored immigration topics throughout the transition and well into the Biden administration. Rather, these two networks dedicated significant coverage to the increase in migration at the southern border only after Fox began focusing on Biden’s “crisis,” a characterization of the increase in migration CNN and MSNBC seemingly adopted. While mentions of a “crisis” at the border began to pick up on Fox throughout February, the network went all in on the term during the week of February 28. CNN and MSNBC, which largely hadn’t been using the “crisis” framing in their conversations about the border, began to do so more heavily the week after Fox News’ oversaturated coverage.
Right-leaning Facebook pages similarly dominated the online conversation about immigration with the end of the Trump administration in late 2020 through the beginning of the Biden administration in 2021. This prevalence was also notable in pages dedicated to talk about the “crisis” of the migration increase at the border, and the conversation spiked in interactions and overall quantity at roughly the same time as the cable networks pushed this narrative in late February. Right-leaning pages’ posts about immigration and the “crisis” at the border often pushed racist tropes and stereotypes and were rife with misinformation.
How a narrative bounces around the online echo chamber
Click over to see the details of how this happens. It’s pretty amazing.
This is a pernicious narrative that may very well hurt the Democrats in 2022 and the right knows it. They are being aided by the media which fell into those old well-worn grooves without a second thought.