Fact Checking #WhereAreTheChildren

On the Media

• Episode: Fact Checking #WhereAreTheChildren
• Website: On the Media
• Feed URL: http://feeds.wnyc.org/onthemedia
• Duration: 00:15:39
• Published: 2018-05-30 18:00

We talk a lot about right wing news outlets picking up out-of-context facts and amplifying them in their outrage machine, so as to infuriate and validate their angry audiences. But this phenomenon is not solely the province of the political right, as we saw last week when two separate stories about immigration policy in the Trump era morphed into one outrage-inspiring tale.

Paige Austin is an immigration lawyer for the New York Civil Liberties Union. She explains to Bob how liberals came to believe that the Trump administration had torn nearly 1,500 children from their parents' arms, and then lost them — and how this conflation presents potential dangers for the very population that she hopes to defend.