The Washington PostDemocracy Dies in Darkness

Opinion Biden should fact-check the White House press corps

Press secretary Jen Psaki during a briefing at the White House on Monday. (Evan Vucci/AP)

The White House press corps, ginned up by Republican hype, has for weeks hounded White House press secretary Jen Psaki and anyone else from the Biden administration who comes into the briefing room about what is happening at the border. Don’t we have a crisis at the border? Why won’t you call it a crisis? Are Republicans right that we have an “open border”? (Spoiler: No.)

As my Post colleague Margaret Sullivan writes, “The burgeoning number of migrants — including thousands of children — is a legitimate concern and a valid story. But much of the news media seems to be using it to show that they intend to present [President] Biden in just as critical a light as they often did Trump — regardless of whether that’s deserved.” What’s more: The media storyline has been factually misleading.

In reality, there has been no surge of arrivals outside the normal fluctuation of migration. “It’s the usual seasonal increase,” according to three academics who write in The Post’s Monkey Cage, using data from U.S. Customs and Border Protection. This is what the facts show:

We analyzed monthly CBP data from 2012 to now and found no crisis or surge that can be attributed to Biden administration policies. Rather, the current increase in apprehensions fits a predictable pattern of seasonal changes in undocumented immigration combined with a backlog of demand because of 2020’s coronavirus border closure.

The notion that Biden trigged an onslaught of juveniles from desperate situations by saying "do not come now” is flat-out wrong. Per the Monkey Cage report: “It appears that migrants are continuing to enter the United States in the same numbers as in fiscal year 2019 — plus the pent-up demand from people who would have come in fiscal year 2020, but for the pandemic.” If media figures had taken a moment to catch their breath, they might have examined how implausible it is that a president’s phrasing of words would drive parents to send their children thousands of miles under life-threatening conditions. On its face, the GOP storyline was not credible.

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It is worth exploring how coverage can get so out of whack. Certainly, there is fault in the administration for not presenting this data and not allowing reporters to view the facilities. The feeding frenzy got worse with time as reporters regurgitated the same sound bites.

But it also seems that reporters have not yet adjusted to the post-45th-president era. They continue to follow the former president’s goings-on despite a lack of relevance and newsworthiness. (Is it news that an ex-president who often announced plans that never happened — infrastructure week! — says he wants to create a social media platform in a couple of months? Arguably not.) Moreover, they seem determined to create the same level of emotion and conflict in an administration that is emotionally contained and de-escalates conflict. The administration is worried! No, it’s struggling! No, make that besieged!

Every president must be covered with a critical eye, but the constant bias for drama leads to misleading coverage when the Oval Office inhabitant is not drama-prone. The withdrawal of a single nominee is not, despite Politico’s catastrophizing, evidence that White House chief of staff Ron Klain is on thin ice.

Finally, the media continues to take Republicans seriously and cover them as though they are acting in good faith. Simply repeating the hyperventilation from Republicans desperate to change the subject from the American Rescue Plan is not journalism. There is an obligation to independently verify data and do some homework before launching into a linguistic argument about what constitutes a “crisis.”

The lesson here for the administration is to debunk and rebut a false Republican-driven narrative quickly. As they do with covid-19 hearings, showering reporters with data rather than debating an issue on Republican terms generally works better. It is now also incumbent on the media to review its coverage and come clean with viewers and readers. When its breathless coverage turns out to be deeply misleading, it should explain how and why they got it wrong.

Read more:

Alexandra Petri: A look inside the plans for the Trump Social Network

The Post’s View: Trump’s continuing obsession makes Georgia ground zero in the voting wars

Max Boot: Republicans want to make voting hard and gun ownership easy

Henry Olsen: Democrats care about democracy — until they need to undo a GOP win

Lawrence Lessig: This is no time to compromise on democracy reform

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