Who would have thought that someone whose entire job it is to describe current events in writing would police which descriptions may be used?
Sadly, that’s exactly what much of the journalism industry has become. Take Ana Goñi-Lessan, a journalist with the Tallahassee Democrat, who took it upon herself to answer a question nobody was asking!
This week, Goñi-Lessan tweeted: “I’ve already seen this a lot as news media reports on Title 42 ending, just want to put this out there again,” she said. “Try not to use words like ‘surge’ and ‘flood’ and ‘onslaught’ when talking about migrants.”
Goñi-Lessan then linked to a Washington Post opinion piece titled, “Stop using ‘surge’ and ‘wave’ to describe what’s happening at the border.”
This is relevant because the Biden administration just ended Title 42, a provision that allowed the U.S. to expedite deportations of illegal immigrants to prevent the spread of a communicable disease — a COVID-19 holdover.
The policy was a band-aid on a bullet hole, but it was doing something. And now with it ending, we’ve seen a surge of people at the border hoping to come into the country. That’s exactly what a mass of thousands of people is: a surge.
Cameron County Judge Eddie Treviño declared a disaster in his county ahead of the expected influx of migrants his home will shoulder. But hey, let’s take seriously the concerns of this journalist living in Florida about which words we use to describe A MASSIVE INFLUX OF PEOPLE ACROSS OUR SOUTHERN BORDER.
Not only is this person’s hand wringing silly and does nothing to help the media actually describe what’s going on, it’s flat out wrong.
What border communities are facing here is a wave of people and describing it as such is not editorializing. But you know what is? Intentionally underselling what’s happening out of some twisted intention to avoid causing offense.
And people wonder why the legacy media isn’t taken seriously.
The Texan is not that, in fact, we were founded to be an alternative to just that. We’ve covered the border as much or more than any other issue since we launched four years ago. We do so thoroughly and accurately without any perverted intention to massage out a narrative one way or another.
As the expiration of Title 42 loomed last Thursday, the Texas House debated its priority border security legislation. Democrats successfully killed one of them — a bill that would have invoked the constitution’s “invasion” clause and created a state-run Border Protection Unit — though Republicans amended much of that proposal onto another border security bill.
In typical fashion, the legacy media framed the Border Protection Unit as something akin to free-range militia-like bands of desperados arresting illegal immigrants crossing the border, totally ignoring the fact that the state itself would oversee it and establish its protocols.
But, of course, that matters not to these narrative spinners. That’s what happens when you’re more concerned about using a word one person finds offensive than accurately describing the news.
The legacy media has bought into that terrible outlook hook, line, and sinker.