Trevor Noah calls out “fake news”
The Daily Show’s Trevor Noah called out “fake news” this week when media agencies had falsely claimed President Donald Trump “lost 1,500 migrant children” and linked an incorrect 2014 photo to the story.
New York Times Editor-in-Chief Jake Silverstein shared a picture taken during Obama’s term and tried to link it to President Trump’s administration. The photo shows migrant children sleeping in cages. According to a KECY sister station, the pictures were actually published in 2014 by The Arizona Republic after they detained thousands of children crossing the border illegally. Silverstein also made a series of false tweets, one stating, “First glimpse of immigrant children at holding facility.” He later blamed his false news on his family by tweeting, “My bad (and a good reminder not to RT things while distracted w family on the weekend).” Several of his followers responded by referring to the New York Times as “fake news” on Twitter. Someone on Twitter stated, “This is what happens when you throw away your journalistic standards in favor of political bias.”
A CNN reporter, Hadas Gold, was also one of many who shared the 2014 photo. White House counselor Kellyanne Conway responded by stating, “Your CNN colleague retweeted two migrant children, I suppose, laying in a cage to make the point against this president. It happened under President Obama’s watch and then [she] deleted the tweet because it didn’t fit the narrative.” Gold deleted her tweet afterwards and stated, “Deleted previous tweet because gave impression of recent photos (they’re from 2014).” One Twitter user responded, “Don’t delete it. You could’ve have said ‘Correction: These were children detained under the Obama administration.”
President Trump tweeted about the falsely used photo this week stating, “Democrats mistakenly tweet 2014 pictures from Obama’s term showing children from the Border in steel cages. They thought it was recent pictures in order to make us look bad, but backfires.”
The falsely linked migrant photo from 2014 is only one example of “fake news” that President Donald Trump often mentions. In early 2017, President Trump signed Executive Order 13769, which temporarily lowered the number of refugees from seven countries in order to come up with a proper vetting method. Those seven countries were Syria, Libya, Somalia, Yemen, Iran, Iraq, and Sudan. Several mainstream media outlets incorrectly called it the “Muslim Ban,” and linked it to being prejudice. However, the executive order did not ban Muslims. There were several mostly majority Muslim countries not on the executive order list.
Earlier this week Trevor Noah, comedian and host of The Daily Show, defended President’s Trump’s claims of “fake news” regarding the 2014 immigrant children photo. Noah said on his show, “Another misinformed immigration scandal blew up online. Someone tweeted these photos of the U.S. government holding undocumented children in cages…Again, without doing research, people online lost their sh**.” He then went on to say that the children weren’t missing but were unaccounted for since sponsors refused to respond to follow up calls.
Noah later encouraged people to take a breath, saying, “Let’s read past headlines before we start sharing misleading stories that [President] Trump will use to discredit all other news.”
