JD Vance admits lying about immigrants for media attention. Will the media keep giving him what he wants?
On Saturday I explained that the news media’s coverage of the dangerous racist lies Donald Trump and JD Vance are telling about immigrants privileges those lies by making immigration the biggest campaign story of the past week — exactly what Trump and Vance want.
On Sunday, JD Vance went on CNN and confirmed that this is exactly what’s happening. Here’s Marc Caputo in The Bulwark:
DONALD TRUMP’S CAMPAIGN IS NOT displeased that they’ve been widely condemned for spreading the urban legend of Haitian migrants eating cats and dogs in Springfield, Ohio.
If the national media is talking about immigration, they reason, they’re winning.
The mastermind of the cynical, xenophobic strategy, Trump running mate JD Vance, acknowledged in Sunday show interviews that he platformed the unsubstantiated pet-eating rumors to force a conversation about the downsides of Vice President Kamala Harris’s immigration policies.
“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” Vance told Dana Bash on CNN’s State of the Union, “because you guys are completely letting Kamala Harris coast.”
When Bash noted that Vance had admitted to “creating the story,” the Ohio Republican insisted he was basing his statements on “firsthand accounts from my constituents.” But then he betrayed the real purpose of his remarks: He wanted the media to focus on immigration.
And here’s The New York Times on Sunday:
Senator JD Vance of Ohio, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, said Sunday that he stood by the debunked claims he and former President Donald J. Trump have spread suggesting Haitian migrants were eating pets, saying that he was willing “to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention.”
And Mr. Vance responded indignantly when asked about the bomb threats that have upended life in Springfield, Ohio, the city where he and Mr. Trump falsely claimed that the pets were being eaten.
“I’ve been trying to talk about the problems in Springfield for months,” Mr. Vance said on CNN, referring to strains he said that a large influx of Haitian migrants had placed on the city’s public services. He went on: “The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes. If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”
When the CNN host, Dana Bash, noted that he had used the word “creating,” Mr. Vance replied, “I say that we’re creating a story, meaning we’re creating the American media focusing on it.”
So at this point, America’s news companies know they’re giving Trump and Vance exactly what they want — because JD Vance said so on national television.
The question is whether they’ll change their approach, and cover this story the way they always should have been covering it: Not as an immigration story, but as a story about Donald Trump and JD Vance being dishonest to their core and flagrantly racist — and intentionally trying to divide Americans against each other and incite violence against immigrants. As I wrote on Saturday:
So how should the news media approach this? How can they cover the Trump-Vance lies without privileging the lie? Simple: Make the character and actions of the people telling the lie the story, rather than making the topic of the lie the story.
When Donald Trump lies that Haitian immigrants are stealing and eating pets, that should be the hook for an article about Donald Trump’s long history of lying; about the fundamental lack of honest, character, and integrity that this demonstrates. The result of Trump’s lies shouldn’t be articles about immigration, it should be articles about Donald Trump’s lifelong dishonesty and the consequences it poses, and articles about Trump’s lengthy history of directing hatred at racial minorities, and about his lengthy history of intentionally inciting threats of violence as well as actual violence.
[….]
When it comes to Donald Trump and JD Vance lying about Haitian immigrants, immigration is not the story here. The story is that Donald Trump and JD Vance are liars who want to incite hatred and violence as a means to attaining power, and are doing so in a way that echoes history’s most evil dehumanization campaigns.
I’m not confident the news media will stop privileging the Trump-Vance lie.1 But at least now that JD Vance has spelled out what he and Trump are doing, journalists can’t deny knowing they’re giving Trump and Vance exactly what they want.
One reason I suspect the news media will keep privileging the Trump-Vance lie is that this is not my first rodeo. Another reason is that journalists are still sanitizing this racist lie as mere “unfounded rumors,” as this NBC campaign reporter did on Sunday after Vance’s CNN appearance: ↩
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