Fox News Anchor Joins Trump Fan Whinefest On Viral Video Of Pre-Trump CNN Report On ICE Raids

Fox News anchor John Roberts joined a MAGA gripefest that falsely suggested a CNN segment on ICE from 2016 demonstrates a bias in coverage against President Donald Trump.

The U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency has dominated media coverage since the killing of Renee Nicole Good by ICE agent Jonathan Ross last week.

On Tuesday night, a pro-Trump account posted video of a 2016 CNN package entitled “CNN exclusive ride-along with ICE team arresting undocumented immigrants,” and went viral with the suggestion that “Six months later, Trump won the election and ICE was then labeled the Gestapo.”

That touched off a MAGA whinefest that included the likes of Elon Musk, Chris P. Bacon, and John Roberts.

The Fox Hard News Anchor wrote:

Watch this – then compare it to the coverage we are witnessing by the same media outlets today.

What’s the difference between what ICE is doing now and what it was doing 10 years ago…? One thing…

But if you watch the actual segment, you might notice more than the one difference — Donald Trump — that Roberts is suggesting. For example:

• The agents in this package are actually going after criminals, rather than campaigning on going after criminals but instead grabbing up mostly non-criminal migrants and the occasional U.S. citizen.
• When they mistakenly arrest someone — a suspect’s brother — they apologize and let him go instead of deporting him to a torture gulag.
• None of the agents wear masks to hide their identities.
• None of the agents shoots a woman three times in the face.
• None of the agents shoots a woman two times in the face.
• None of the agents shoots a woman one time in the face.

Those are just a few of the more obvious differences. But that sort of willful dishonesty and/or ignorance is to be expected from Trump-worshipping cultists with a terminal engorgement for nonwhite immigrants.

But for an objective journalist? Not so much.

So why am I picking on John Roberts? Well, Fox News poses him as one of those, even if — on a story like this — he’s not acting like one. In fairness to Roberts, fellow anchor Harris Faulkner did a segment about the clip on her show Outnumbered, but that’s pretty clearly presented as an opinion panel program, and she’s not really trying that hard to fool anyone.

And even Faulkner didn’t lean as hard into the premise as Roberts did, merely observing that “CNN was not criticizing the agency, instead it touted exclusive access to the ride along on several I.C.E. raids.”

Bill Hemmer, another “hard newser” appearing on the show, would only say, “The language has changed. The positions have changed,” and then changed the subject.

Roberts, who occupies that “respected newsman runner-up” slot that Bret Baier used to own before Chris Wallace left the network, went way out on the MAGA limb.

I know a lot of my friends will probably scoff and say “Why are you shocked?”

I’m not. But I’ll say the same thing I say when they say that about whatever outrages Trump is spewing out on a given day: just because we expect it doesn’t mean it doesn’t matter.

This is a person who is being presented to the largest cable news audience as a trusted, objective journalist. And his work should be held to that standard. There’s never a bad time to remind people that this is not normal.

Watch above via CNN.

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