MSNBC guest and Atlantic writer Adam Serwer blamed the media’s coverage of the immigration in defense of Vice President Kamala Harris’s “not addressing” border issues directly, arguing that the Democratic ticket was “reacting” to “years of alarmism” about the border.
Serwer appeared on MSNBC’s The Sunday Show to speak with host Jonathan Capehart and responded to a wider question asked to his co-panelist, NPR anchor Maria Hinojosa.
Hinojosa said that Harris should “do more” to correct former President Donald Trump’s claims that immigrants negatively impact society using data: “She needs to do more of that in the sense of putting our feet based on reality. That’s why I’ve been saying for a while; she needs to hold a prime time address with a whiteboard where she has all of the statistics and data.”
The guest continued: “And she’s able to say: ‘I look this is the data from the FBI and department of justice. This is actually what we’re seeing.’ She needs to use the data to combat it. But she can’t do it passively. She has to address it and take it on.”
Pivoting to Serwer, Capehart asked whether voters were “too far gone” on the immigration issue and whether a “whiteboard and data points” would hold fire against the “emotional speech” Trump was delivering on the subject.
Serwer, instead, alleviated Trump of the sole blame on the heightened immigration debate and accused the media of helping propagate the rhetoric with “extremely negative” coverage.
No I’m going to be honest here Jonathan. A politician cannot individually reverse a kind of public opinion that is built up over years of alarmism about immigration and the border. The fact is that a lot of Americans, Americans who do not consider themselves racists, who do not think of themselves that way, believe false things about immigrants being a drain on social services, being more likely to be criminals, that they’re responsible for job loss, that they’re responsible for increases in housing prices. None of those things are true, but they don’t know those things are true because most of the time, when they turn on the TV and they see stories about immigration or they open the newspaper and they read stories about immigration, it’s about extremely negative stuff.
And Harris and Walz are reacting to that shift right on immigration. They are not driving it, they are reacting to it and they cannot reverse it simply by putting up a chart. The fact is that this is the way the media covers the issue.
The Atlantic writer’s ire was not just aimed at right-leaning networks but even the host network, MSNBC, as he criticized the “B-roll” footage of the border being played during his own interview.
Look at the B-roll that we’re doing right now. Even though migration is down, we’re showing B-roll of the border. I mean, this is just how the game works. We can’t expect, you know, politicians to correct Americans’ broadly held misconceptions when the media isn’t willing to do that.
Watch above on MSNBC.
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