Fox Business Anchor Smears NY Times For Accurately Reporting on Trump’s ‘Animals’ Remark

Fox Business anchor Dagen McDowell trashed the New York Times this morning in a botched fact-check of sorts on the paper’s accurate reporting of President Donald Trump’s infamous “animals” remark.

McDowell, who co-hosts Mornings with Maria on Fox Business, made the misleading attack against the Times after discussing the paper’s correction on Trump’s crowd size at his recent Nashville, TN rally.

Julie Davis, the Times reporter who inaccurately estimated the crowd size, addressed the correction on Twitter, writing: “When we get it wrong, we say so.”

Not according to McDowell, however.

“Sometimes they don’t correct things that they get wrong,” claimed McDowell. “Because the way that they portrayed the comments that President Trump made about the MS-13 gang, when he called them animals. The New York Times stories did not make that distinction, certainly not in the headline of the story that they wrote. Last time that I checked they didn’t correct it.”

“They tried to dance around it. But he was clearly talking about violent gang members who behead people and beat innocent Americans to death with baseball bats, just to name some of of the crimes — so, again, the charge of bias, when it comes to the New York Times is perfectly fair.”

Her co-host Maria Bartiromo chimed in with agreement, saying, “Well, obviously. They had to make the correction. When [Davis] says when we get it wrong we fix it — well, actually not.”

However, the Fox Business anchors demanding a Times correction apparently did not read the paper’s reporting on Trump’s “animals” comment, nor do they seem to understand the proper context of the president’s remark — which was anything but clear.

The Times piece, headlined, “Trump Calls Some Unauthorized Immigrants ‘Animals’ in Rant,” notes that the president warned that “dangerous people were clamoring to breach the country’s borders and branding such people ‘animals.'”

Given the full context of that discussion with local officials railing against California’s supposed “sanctuary city laws,” this is an accurate summation of the meeting, as violent MS-13 members were not the only topic of the discussion.

Sheriff Margaret Mims of Fresno County — to whom the president was responding when he dropped the “animals” bomb — said the sanctuary policy barred ICE from using county information “to find the bad guys” — “bad guys” being a vague enough term to reference all undocumented immigrants, as Trump often has.

Mims was attacking California’s sanctuary policy that bars ICE from using county information to arrest undocumented immigrants who haven’t been charged or convicted of notable criminal behavior, not just “violent gang members who behead people and beat innocent Americans to death.” However, the law does allow for local officials to handover prisoners to ICE if they are guilty of a felony within the last 15 years or are guilty of other more serious offenses.

While the president may have not understood the policy Mims was referencing, Trump’s vague response to the sheriff is more to blame for the confusion than the Times or other news outlets that conservative media are attacking.

In his scattered comment — “You wouldn’t believe how bad these people are. These aren’t people, these are animals, and we’re taking them out of the country at a level and at a rate that’s never happened before” — it is not clear who the president considers to be “animals.”

Furthermore, ICE’s record in Trump’s America has focused on treating undocumented immigrants without so much as a misdemeanor like animals, and the immigration law enforcement group arrested 45,436 immigrants with no criminal records under the president’s watch in 2017 — a significant uptick from the Obama administration’s policies.

Additionally, critics of Trump’s “animals” comment argue the administration is simply using MS-13 to portray other, non-criminal Hispanic immigrants as subhuman. These concerns are not without proof, as a recent Slate report on ICE details how the agency falsely claimed a Dreamer had ties to MS-13 in an attempt to deport him.

Watch above, via Fox Business.

[image via screengrab]

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This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.