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CJR
INTERN ATIO NAL
Out of Focus By Stephania Taladrid
O
NE OF THE FIRST FLASH
points Joe Biden faced as president came over the United States–Mexico border. Talk of the so-called Biden Border Crisis, led by Republican commentators, began even before inauguration. Everywhere from the Washington Examiner to the New York Times, journalists reported on a “new rush” of migrants and Biden’s “open-door approach” as GOP officials seized on opportunities to escalate the hysteria. A delegation of nineteen Republican senators led by Ted Cruz and John Cornyn toured the Rio Grande aboard a fleet of Border Patrol boats armed with machine guns; afterward, they held a press conference along the bank of the river, where Tom Cotton, of Arkansas, declared, “There’s a word for what’s happening at our border: it’s insanity.” Days later, Cotton and other members of his party encouraged reporters to consider the political nature of their crusade, calling immigration “a central issue in the campaign, in 2022.” There could be no denying that the number of migrant apprehensions had risen since the previous summer, when Trump virtually closed the southern border. But, in their coverage, many news outlets glossed over crucial context. For one thing, consistently citing the arrests of people crossing told only part of the story; doing so did not reflect how many migrants were ultimately expelled. In March, when Customs and Border Protection reported having taken more than a hundred and seventy-two thousand
migrants into custody, most of them from Central America, the Biden administration sent back the vast majority under Title 42, an emergency health order that Trump had used to expel people en masse. By April, the number of migrants seeking refuge at the border rose slightly, yet talk of the “Biden Border Crisis” largely subsided—and a brief moment of reckoning ensued. In “The Washington Post owes Biden an apology,” Eric Boehlert, a media critic, wrote, “In terms of the amount of border news coverage this year, it’s been eye-popping, as the press continues to take its cues from Republicans. During Biden’s first nine weeks in office, immigration was the third most-common topic of news coverage, according to a Pew study—and that coverage was overwhelmingly negative.” He added, “The press and the GOP have helped create the border ‘crisis’ this year.” The sensationalism rife in immigration news over the past several months not only showed how political rhetoric can permeate journalists’ work, it also laid bare the episodic nature of Latin America coverage in the US. Immigration is too often viewed through the narrow lens of Washington politics, as stories ignore the roots and ramifications beyond the southern border. “Latin America is a blind spot for the US media,” Brian Winter, the editor in chief of Americas Quarterly, said. “And Central America is the blindest spot of all.” Before the headlines around the “Border Crisis,” there had been minimal coverage of the pandemic’s
