Breaking the Vicious Media Cycle
Breaking the Vicious Media Cycle
As Right-Wing Media and Fearmongering Ramps Up, a Border Filmmaker Challenges the Dis-content Creators
The lifting of Title 42 on May 11 came and went. The United States is still standing. I’m being sarcastic, of course. In the weeks leading up to the expiration of the obscure public health statute, Fox News and the right-wing media ecosystem cranked up the hysteria to full meltdown, so you might have thought the nation was facing Armageddon.
As Title 42 expired, El Paso was “calm and peaceful,” according to El Paso Matters, a nonprofit news outlet. But you wouldn’t know it from the dominant coverage. Once again, El Paso, a historic city with deep ties to Mexico, was mined for content by the booming right-wing media ecosystem. As local and regional media outlets close, far-right digital outlets and content creators are filling the void. I call them “dis-content creators” because they make a profit from stoking fear, spreading disinformation, and sowing division. And they now dominate the narrative around the border, and thus the country’s perception of what is happening there.
I’ve been writing about our southern border since 1998. Over the years I’ve noticed that the xenophobic hysteria comes and goes in cycles—usually leading up to midterm and presidential elections. In the Obama era it was fearmongering over Muslims and false reports of ISIS training camps at the border, and “border spillover” from the drug cartels in Mexico. Now it’s making asylum seekers out to be an invading army, loaded down with fentanyl, that is coming to kill us, or at least vote illegally.
There used to be a healthy enough media ecosystem that this stuff could be debunked quickly. But now, not so much. National investigative outlets are laying off reporters, and local and state newspapers are shuttering altogether. It’s now the shouters and disinformation peddlers who dominate the headlines as was demonstrated on May 11 when one such dis-content creator was challenged on camera by an El Paso filmmaker. I’ll get to that in a moment, but first I want to mention the elephant at the border, which is Fox News, the nation’s top cable news network, with about 3 million monthly viewers. Even after firing Tucker Carlson, Fox’s primetime purveyor of white supremacy, the outlet is still pumping out the same poison. Leading up to the end of Title 42, in Fox News’ breathless coverage, Laura Ingraham equated asylum seekers in El Paso with an invasion that would be fatal for North Americans: “The open borders radicals think every migrant sleeping on the ground tonight waiting for processing is a future Democrat voter,” Ingraham said. “Because of what they’ve done, an untold number of Americans will not just lose jobs but lose their lives.”
Not to be outdone, Republicans like Texas senator Ted Cruz and Texas lieutenant governor Dan Patrick also drove the xenophobia bandwagon over the cliff, characterizing asylum-seeking families as an invading army on Fox News.
“This is a full-on invasion,” proclaimed Cruz, “It is a crisis. And the Biden administration is cheering it on. They’re—they want this to happen. They want more people to come in.”
A week before Title 42 expired, Patrick said, “This country has been invaded for years.” With Biden in the White House, Patrick posited that “10 to 15 percent of the total population will be in America illegally. That’s a plan.”
Sergio Muñoz, vice president of Media Matters for America, a progressive nonprofit that has monitored and analyzed conservative media since 2004, says it has become increasingly extreme and is in a “spiral to the bottom.” What’s different about the current moment, he says, is the “symbiotic relationship between Republican politicians and right-wing media.”
The mainstream Republican platform now includes white supremacist talking points, such as the Great Replacement theory, which surmises that Black and Brown immigrants will replace white Americans. This idea encompasses the notion that we are under invasion by asylum seekers and migrants at the border, and it is repeated ad infinitum on outlets like Fox, where the dehumanization of people is normalized. “They’re just egging each other on to worse and worse positions,” Muñoz says. “There is no consequence for Republicans, because not only are they not held accountable politically, but they also have a platform in right-wing media that will justify it and champion it.”
And Fox is making big money. In 2022 it reported $14 billion in revenue, while elected officials like Cruz and Patrick, who perpetuate these dangerous lies on its airwaves, benefit politically in their primaries. The entire system is a danger to the country, which is a “multicultural and multiracial democracy,” says Muñoz, “as we are echoing some of the darkest periods of our history in how we treat people arriving at our border.”
It’s a vicious cycle in which border communities are being exploited by far-right content creators who are in turn manufacturing lies with deadly consequences, like the 2019 mass shooting in an El Paso Walmart by a self-described white nationalist who was targeting Latinos, citing an “Hispanic invasion of Texas,” in a post before the attack.
Aside from their deadly consequences, these toxic threat narratives prevent Americans from understanding what’s really happening at their own borders. What can border residents do to put an end to the disinformation economy?
Perhaps we could take inspiration from the interaction on May 11 between Jackie Barragan, a documentary filmmaker in El Paso, and a loudmouth racist with a camera.
Barragan, who is making a documentary for PBS about the Rio Grande, visited the border wall to see what all the fuss was about on the last day of Title 42. “There were tons of media from all over the world flooding the border wall,” she said. “And I felt like they were just there to capture images of migrants crossing but not really personalizing their stories.”
Barragan is part of a Latine-led film organization called Femme Frontera, composed of women and nonbinary filmmakers who work to enrich and expand the narrative around border culture. With that in mind, Barragan was not there to film people crossing the border but to document the river and its interactions with people. “The river is supposed to be a place of transportation and a place of life,” Barragan said. “When we started using it as a political divide, it not only stopped human migration, but it also stopped animal migration. It created all these environmental repercussions.”
This was part of the border story that Barragan wanted to tell, but her thoughts were interrupted by a man being followed by a camera who was making racist comments. “I’m Venezuelan,” he shouted in broken Spanish, “and I want free stuff!”
Everything was under control and peaceful, Barragan said, adding, “People were waiting at the ports of entry and waiting for Border Patrol and exercising their legal right to claim asylum.”
But the man with the camera kept yelling, she said, and saying that the border was under invasion. “It’s so frustrating to me because I’m thinking, this guy’s not even from here and he’s making a scene, with no consequences,” she said.
Barragan couldn’t help it, and laughed out loud, after the man made yet another racist comment. Then he turned the camera on her, but instead of being intimidated, Barragan challenged him. “Whenever there is an influx of migrants, the community comes together, donations come in, food is made to welcome people in a humane way,” she told him. “El Paso is a welcoming community, and that’s a greater lesson for the rest of the country.”
The obnoxious guy, it turned out, was from InfoWars. Yes, InfoWars is still in operation, even after its founder, Alex Jones, was ordered by a judge to pay $1.4 billion in legal damages for defaming the parents of children killed in the Sandy Hook massacre. Jones declared bankruptcy but is still running his business selling products like “1776 Testosterone Boost” and “charcoal activated toothpaste” as part of his disinformation empire, which has made him a multimillionaire.
The obnoxious guy (I’m not going to name him, because he doesn’t need the publicity) kept interrupting Barragan. “I feel like people are used to that type of interaction now where the person who speaks the loudest and interrupts the most is the one who gets heard. So, I was ready for that type of interaction,” she says.
During the exchange, posted to Instagram, Barragan never loses her composure, no matter how loud and ridiculous the InfoWars guy gets. “As soon as I challenged his perspective, he wasn’t interested in what I had to say,” she said. “I suspected that would happen, but it was cathartic for me to have that conversation anyway, because I’m tired of turning on the news and seeing how many people have this wrong perspective, this racist perspective about the border.”
Maybe she didn’t change the mind of the InfoWars guy, but she received many messages from fellow border residents thanking her afterward. “People are hooked to their screens and are easily manipulated by the images that they see,” Barragan said. “We need accurate documentation and more people from the border sharing their stories.”
Mainstream media also has an obligation to question the right wing’s threat narrative, said Muñoz. “Don’t just borrow this rhetoric about the ‘crisis’ and ‘surge’ and terminology synonymous with an invasion,” he said. “Provide context and don’t fall for the press stunts.”
After her one-sided conversation with InfoWars, Barragan said she’s not deterred. “If we can just listen to each other more,” she said, “I think people would be more understanding and compassionate.”
Want more? Check out these podcasts from The Border Chronicle on changing the toxic border narrative:
This article was also in the non profit El Paso newspaper. I’m looking for news with neither a right nor left political bias. I just want the facts.
“Border Patrol detentions in El Paso rise sharply with end of Title 42”
While I subscribe to be well rounded and to hear things I may not have heard before, I think it's not writing to reach a wider audience to call Tucker Carlson a white supremacist.