Video of the mounted border patrol agents suggests they were holding their reins, not whips.
Welcome back to “Forgotten Fact-Checks,” a weekly column produced by National Review’s News Desk. This week, we examine the claim that border patrol agents are whipping migrants, break down an embarrassing week for the New York Times, dissect the Biden administration’s recent string of failures, and explore more media misses.
The Media Plays a Game of ‘Telephone’ on Border Reporting
Vice News declared in a tweet on Monday that border patrol agents “are whipping Haitian migrants at the US-Mexico border in Texas.” Yet neither the story nor the Al Jazeera video it links to suggests that the agents are actually whipping the migrants. Vice writes of “officers on horseback swinging whips in the faces of Haitians,” while a report by the El Paso Times described a border patrol agent as having “swung his whip menacingly” while “charging his horse toward the men in the river.”
However, the videos that have surfaced of the incident appear to show the agents wielding their reins — not whips — as they try to contain the flow of migrants across the river. And, while the agents can be seen swinging their reins menacingly, none of the available video evidence shows border patrol agents striking migrants with their reins.
Here’s the video pic.twitter.com/itFwZfYN45
— Sawyer Hackett (@SawyerHackett) September 20, 2021
PBS’s Yamiche Alcindor asked White House press secretary Jen Psaki during a press briefing on Monday what the “consequences” would be “if what we’re seeing is what we’re seeing,” in regards to border patrol agents “seemingly using whips.”
“We just saw this footage,” Psaki responded. “It’s horrible to watch. I just have to get more information on it. I don’t have more information on it. I’ve also seen the video. I can’t imagine what the scenario is where that would be appropriate. I’m certainly not suggesting that, but we’ve just seen the footage earlier this morning.”
Homeland Security secretary Alejandro Mayorkas said the situation would be investigated, but noted that “to ensure control of the horse, long reins are used.” Moreover, a source within Customs and Border Control told Townhall senior writer Julio Rosas that “agents use their reins for a lot of reasons. Primarily it’s used to steer the horse, but agents will also spin them sometimes to deter people from getting too close to the horse. If they get too close, the horse can step on them, breaking bones or causing other injuries. Agents also need to maintain control of their reins to avoid losing control of the horse, which can cause injuries to immigrants, the agents, and the horses.”
Border patrol agents have been overwhelmed by thousands of mostly Haitian migrants streaming across the border in Del Rio, Texas, and camping out on the American side of the Rio Grande under an international bridge. The number of migrants at the camp has exploded since Wednesday, when there were 4,000 migrants there. Since then, the number has topped 14,000 at times.
Representative August Pfluger (R., Texas) who visited the area, described it as “worse than you could imagine” and said that border patrol agents are worried “the worst is yet to come.”
Is This Really “All The News That’s Fit to Print”?
The paper of record came under fire this week for a combination of distasteful and flat-out inaccurate reporting.
It started with its stealth-edited coverage of the New York Post’s Hunter Biden laptop story to reflect that it is not “unsubstantiated,” as it described the story in its initial reporting on Monday, despite widely available evidence supporting the claims.
The “unsubstantiated” claim was included in a story about the Federal Election Commission’s ruling that Twitter did not make an unlawful campaign contribution to Joe Biden by censoring the story last October. The “unsubstantiated” charge was removed one day after the article was published. Notably, the change was not accompanied by an editor’s note or other acknowledgment of the original error.
Later that week, the paper published a glowing feature on White House press secretary Jen Psaki: “Bully Pulpit No More: Jen Psaki’s Turn at the Lectern.”
The article, written by Michael Grynbaum, lauded Psaki as “straightforward” and “professional.”
“Crisp and precise in her answers, even if she does not always respond directly to a reporter’s questions, Ms. Psaki, in her speaking style, is a contrast to Mr. Biden and his circuitous folksiness. In interviews, Washington correspondents often used the word ‘professional’ — high praise in D.C. — to describe interactions with her, deeming her straightforward, detail-dense briefings a relief after an era when Mr. Trump’s press secretaries repeatedly insulted, denigrated and frequently ignored journalists,” Grynbaum wrote.
Given that the role of a White House press secretary is to provide accurate information to the public, Grynbaum might have spent more time on his throw-away admission that Psaki “does not always respond directly to a reporter’s questions.”
The report came just one day after Psaki made misleading claims about the vaccination rates in Florida and Texas in trying to justify its new “equitable” centralized distribution policy for monoclonal antibody treatments.
She asserted that “monoclonal antibodies are lifesaving therapies that are used after infection to prevent more severe outcomes. So clearly the way to protect people and save more lives is to get them vaccinated so that they don’t get COVID to begin with. But over the last month, given the rising cases due to the delta variant and the lowered number of vaccination rates in some of these states — like Florida, like Texas — just seven states are making up 70 percent of the orders. Our supply is not unlimited and we believe it should be equitable across states across the country.”
Meanwhile, Florida ranks 18th among the states in terms of the proportion of its adult population inoculated with at least one does of the vaccine, and it has a higher full vaccination rate than states such as Illinois and Michigan, according to the New York Times. Texas ranks 25th in the first category, and ahead of Nevada and North Carolina in the second.
The Psaki fluff piece was published amid a series of failures for the Biden administration: the announcement that a recent drone strike in Kabul killed civilians instead of ISIS-K members, an FDA advisory panel’s decision not to recommend booster shots for people under 65, and a rapidly worsening crisis in Del Rio, Texas.
Then, on Saturday, the paper published an article on Iranian nuclear scientist Mohsen Fakhrizadeh, who was assassinated by Israeli operatives in November 2020. While the scientist was allegedly linked to efforts to build covert nuclear weapons for Iran, the New York Times social-media team thought it wise to spotlight how Fakhrizadeh spent his time when he wasn’t helping a genocidal regime develop nuclear weapons.
“Despite his prominent position, Iran’s top nuclear scientist wanted to live a normal life. He loved reading poetry, taking his family to the seashore and driving his own car instead of having bodyguards drive him in an armored vehicle,” the tweet read.
What is happening at the Gray Lady?
Media Is Mixed on Biden’s Recent Missteps
Associated Press reporter Jonathan Lemire stepped into the fray over the weekend to defend President Biden against criticism for his aforementioned recent string of mistakes, claiming that the country’s difficulties were caused by “uncontrollable events.”
The Pentagon admitted its errant drone strike. COVID boosters did not get full approval. France recalled its ambassador
The punishing headlines, all within an hour, underscored the perils for a president from uncontrollable events that can define a term https://t.co/Vjnakmdvr2
— Jonathan Lemire (@JonLemire) September 18, 2021
Many were quick to point out that a drone strike is not exactly an “uncontrollable event” for a commander in chief.
Still, others in the left-leaning and mainstream media deserve credit for calling out the administration after it acknowledged that its August 29 drone strike killed ten civilians, including seven children. Officials said the strike had been a “mistake.”
A “mistake”’is when you forget to take out the trash, or sleep through your alarm. This is absolutely horrifying. https://t.co/f7ugOmzK6s
— Garrett Haake (@GarrettHaake) September 17, 2021
It is deeply tragic and fitting that the final American military action before withdrawing from Afghanistan was basically a signature strike — a drone attack based on pattern of behavior, not against a fully IDed target https://t.co/BVc4qONyb7
— Hayes Brown (@HayesBrown) September 17, 2021
Seven kids, who ran out excitedly into the courtyard to meet their dad / uncle when he got home from work. https://t.co/bjfFNswMX6
— Jonathan Swan (@jonathanvswan) September 17, 2021
Headline Fail of the Week
The Washington Post reports that “White House Rules Out Concessions on Debt Ceiling While GOP Refuses to Help Avert Financial Crisis.” A stubborn administration is insisting on pressing forward with unprecedented spending packages while pulling a Michael Corleone — “Senator? . . . You can have my answer now, if you like. My final offer is this: nothing” — on debt ceiling talks. But it is Republicans who are to blame for not gratefully accepting the nonexistent offer?
The Post’s own reporting indicates that Democrats have the votes to raise the ceiling themselves but are hesitant to do so “because they do not believe they should be solely responsible for voting to prevent a national default and because the current national debt was created by both parties.” In other words, because they don’t want to bear the political costs of the spending they’re championing.
Media Misses
• Nikole Hannah-Jones, the New York Times journalist who developed the magazine’s controversial 1619 Project, has been named to Time’s list of the “100 most influent people” in 2021. While the magazine’s announcement quotes American film director Barry Jenkins as saying Hannah-Jones is “larger than life” and calling the 1619 Project her “greatest work,” the project has been the subject of intense scrutiny. Historians have called the 1619 edition of the New York Times Magazine, of which she was lead essayist, “a very unbalanced, one-sided account” and “wrong in so many ways.” Critics have called the project “not only ahistorical,” but “actually anti-historical.”
The project, a feature on slavery in the U.S. that aims to shift perceptions of American history and change what students are taught in schools, won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary. However, after receiving scrutiny from historians and politicians, the Times issued a clarification on the project.