Sunday, October 4, 2020

the last book I ever read (Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth by Brian Stelter, excerpt eleven)

from Hoax: Donald Trump, Fox News, and the Dangerous Distortion of Truth by Brian Stelter:

Reporting was no match for migrant fearmongering. When New York Times reporter Emily Cochrane asked Trump to back up his made-up-out-of-thin-air claims that the “caravan” was full of “hardened criminals,” he responded, “Oh please, please, don’t be a baby.”

Trump continued to spread misinformation that he picked up on Fox & Friends. A crumb of information from Guatemala’s president about his country’s past deportation of immigrants with links to terrorism—shared in an apparent bid to impress the U.S.—was whipped by right-wing websites into a lie about the current “caravan.” This lie was transmitted from the web to Fox & Friends by Pete Hegseth on Monday, October 22. “They caught over a hundred ISIS fighters in Guatemala trying to use this caravan,” he said, falsely. Hegseth infected Trump, who tweeted during the show and said “criminals and unknown Middle Easterners are mixed in” with the migrants. He didn’t attribute this to Fox, he stated it as fact, and said, “I have alerted Border Patrol and Military that this is a National Emergency.”

A lone voice on Fox tried to correct him. It was Shep, of course.



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