PolitiFact may have teamed up with PBS for the remainder of the 2024 election cycle, but perhaps they should be checking PBS News Hour instead because on Friday, host Amna Nawaz falsely claimed Donald Trump was using “more dangerous, kind of, vicious language” in targeting “black and brown immigrants” than he was in 2016.
Recapping Trump’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, Nawaz declared to New York Times columnist David Brooks, “The thing that struck me about — that was different this year was particularly on illegal immigration. There was much more dangerous, kind of, vicious language, targeting really black and brown immigrants, talking about them carrying disease and attacking women and stealing jobs.”
That’s simply wrong. Here’s what Trump actually said, “And you know who's being hurt the most by millions of people pouring into our country, the black population and the Hispanic population because they're taking the jobs from our black population, our Hispanic population, and they're also taking them from unions. The unions are suffering because of it.”
Sure, Trump was talking about blacks and Latino Americans having to compete with illegal immigrants for work, but that’s not new from Trump. It also has nothing to do with Nawaz’s claim that Trump was demagoguing about black and Latino immigrants bringing diseases. The only time Trump used the word “disease” was in reference to unleashing American innovation to cure diseases like cancer and Alzheimer’s.
Facts aside, Nawaz then asked Brooks for his thoughts, and he agreed with her and suggested that the GOP ticket was being hypocritical, “It's paradoxical. And I can't remember another ticket where both candidates are married to an immigrant or children of immigrants.”
Brooks added, “It's gotten uglier and darker. And Trump's grievance has gotten more menacing. At the same time, MAGA is a much more intellectually serious movement than it was. It has an agenda. It has a group of intellectuals. It has a group of magazines, all of which is personified by JD Vance.”
He concluded by reiterating, “Both those realities, one kind of impressive, the way they have intellectually come together around that agenda, and the other kind of alarming, that the level of prejudice seems only to increase.”
Executive producer Sara Just hyped PBS’s partnership with PolitiFact by claiming that people who try to cast doubt on media accuracy damage democracy in the process, but what about news anchors who report falsehoods?
Here is a transcript for the July 19 show:
PBS News Hour
7/19/2024
7:35 PM ET
AMNA NAWAZ: The thing that struck me about — that was different this year was particularly on illegal immigration.
There was much more dangerous, kind of, vicious language, targeting really black and brown immigrants, talking about them carrying disease and attacking women and stealing jobs. Did that stick out to you at all?
DAVID BROOKS: Yes, I did. It's paradoxical. And I can't remember another ticket where both candidates are married to an immigrant or children of immigrants. But I think what's happened is that global populism has done two things. One, it's fed on each other. The Orbans, the Giorgia Melonis, the Marine Le Pens, and the Donald Trumps have fed on each this anti-immigrant theme as the thing that unites them globally.
And so it's gotten uglier and darker. And Trump's grievance has gotten more menacing. At the same time, MAGA is a much more intellectually serious movement than it was. It has an agenda. It has a group of intellectuals. It has a group of magazines, all of which is personified by JD Vance.
And the fact that the Teamsters, where — the president was represented there, was a sign that something much bigger here is happening, that Trump's grievance and the ugliness is true. But the idea that there is an intellectual movement here on defense of the working class, that is also true.
And so I think both those realities, one kind of impressive, the way they have intellectually come together around that agenda, and the other kind of alarming, that the level of prejudice seems only to increase.
