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Authored by Jonathan Turley,

For years, the mainstream media has been criticized for open political bias, including repeating false narratives and claims. 

There is little evidence that that will change despite falling revenues and audiences. 

That was evident this week as leading journalists continued to raise a dubious claim about the Trump Administration deporting children, including cancer patients.

The media has been promulgating a false claim that children as young as four are being deported.

The Administration immediately stated that the decision rested with the mothers on whether they would take the children or leave them in the United States with family.

Many of the same figures accused of promulgating false stories quickly picked up the spin from the Washington Post.

On NBC’s Meet the Press, Kristen Welker pursued the narrative with Secretary of State Marco Rubio:

That would ordinarily leave a journalist looking at their shoes in embarrassment, but Welker decided to double down and add the claim that children are being denied “due process”:

There is a great deal of litigation working through the courts on the level of due process required for deportations. The public overwhelmingly supports the deportation of unlawful immigrants and elected Trump based on his pledge to carry out such deportations. Unlawful immigrants often spend years in this country despite orders of deportation or removal. The level of review depends on their status. If they have previously entered unlawfully, they are subject to expedited removal.

The critical point, however, is that the children are not being deported. 

If they were born in this country, they are still treated as U.S. citizens (though the Administration is challenging birthright citizenship in the courts).

Having a child in the United States does not make parents immune from removal or afford them special legal status over other deportees.

Over at CBS, Margaret Brennan (who was criticized for her “fact checks” in the presidential debate) also jumped on the narrative in interviewing Border Czar Tom Homan on Face the Nation:

Brennan correctly noted that a court recently found a lack of due process in a child’s case. However, Holman had a reasonable response in citing the mother’s election in this one case to leave with her child.

It is important to note that these are two very different cases that were blended into the coverage.

In the second case, the government insists that there was no prior arrangement for the child to be left with the family and that the mother made this decision.

ICE should endeavor to accommodate such requests and there should always be an inquiry into allegations that these women were prevented from making arrangements for their children to remain in the country. However, there will also be practical limits in addressing those issues in the midst of a removal.

If Homan is correct, the mother was in the system long before the actual removal. The father “sending a note” at the end of that process is worth looking into, but it is hardly surprising that the removal proceeded with the mother’s consent.

The same narrative was playing over at ABC as Martha Raddatz had this exchange with former DoJ spokesperson Sarah Isgur:

Again, as Isgur correctly points out, this is the election of the parents who are being removed.

Critics have pushed back on these interviews, noting how the media seemed only marginally interested in thousands of children lost in the system under the Biden Administration as millions poured over the border.

The coverage suggested that children were being thrown on planes to be dumped in some foreign land.

The Washington Post, which is cited for the story, has been repeatedly accused of pushing misleading or false narratives. There was a recent riot in the newsroom when owner Jeff Bezos demanded that the newspaper return to more balanced coverage.

The most telling condemnation came from Post columnist Philip Bump, who wrote “what the actual f**k.” Bump has been repeatedly accused of false claims and previously had a meltdown in an interview when confronted about past false claims. After I wrote a column about the litany of such false claims, the Post surprised many of us by stating that it stood by all of Bump’s reporting, including false columns on the Lafayette Park protests, Hunter Biden’s laptop, and other stories. That was long after other media debunked the claims, but the Post stood by the false reporting.

We have previously discussed the sharp change in culture at the Post, which became an outlet that pushed anti-free speech views and embraced advocacy journalism. The result was that many moderates and conservatives stopped reading the newspaper.

In my book on free speech, I discuss at length how the Post and the mainstream media have joined an alliance with the government and corporations in favor of censorship and blacklisting. I once regularly wrote for the Post and personally witnessed the sharp change in editorial priorities as editors delayed or killed columns with conservative or moderate viewpoints.

Last year, that culture was vividly on display when the newspaper offered no objection or even qualification after its reporter, Cleve Wootson Jr., appeared to call upon the White House to censor the interview of Elon Musk with former President Donald Trump. Under the guise of a question, Wootson told White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre “I think that misinformation on Twitter is not just a campaign issue…it’s an America issue.”

The baby hoax shows that little has (or likely will) changed. In the meantime, the public is moving on. New media is rising as mainstream media audiences shrink. Journalists and columnists are increasingly writing for each other as polling shows trust in the media is at an all-time low.

Robert Lewis, a British media executive who joined the Post, reportedly got into a “heated exchange” with a staffer. Lewis explained that, while reporters were protesting measures to expand readership, the very survival of the paper was now at stake:

It simply does not matter. The media continues to vigorously saw on the branch upon which it is sitting.

Jonathan Turley is the Shapiro professor of public interest law at George Washington University and the author of “The Indispensable Right: Free Speech in an Age of Rage.”