Anatomy of a Media Conspiracy Theory
A false story from the border in January reveals how a media error can create an alternate digital reality
This piece is a little different from the prior two. It’s still a chronicling of the media, en masse, getting something wrong, with plenty of screenshots.
But I want to spend more time unpacking the lingering impact of when the media gets a story wrong, and give a better understanding of the long tail of these types of errors. Character limits make that hard to do in a thread.
But it’s a big piece of why I think writing about the media matters. There’s plenty of reason to critique the press — there’s a reason mainstream outlets have people who do it, too — but one aspect that I don’t think gets enough credit is the ability of the media to tell a compelling political story with clear villains and heroes (especially in an election year) that lives on as the official series of events. Even if that story isn’t true.
The media are the authors of the first, rough draft of history. Even if they get it wrong — and even when they concede they screwed up — what gets recorded in a digital age is often what they initially said.
It typifies a major problem I see with the media: when big narratives turn out to be wrong, they don’t get corrected. The news simply moves on. At least in cases where the inaccuracy bends in a particular political direction. I want to revisit these failures and try to make some edits to that rough draft of history.
Media coverage: One particularly acute example is the drowning deaths of three people entering the country illegally at the Texas/Mexico border back in January 2024.
As a call out: I use “people entering the country illegally” or similar language throughout this piece because I believe that it’s the most accurate description of the people who died. We don’t know if they were migrants (although they could have been) and I think the media’s recent shift to calling everyone who crosses the border illegally a “migrant” is wrong. As an editorial decision, it seems nonsensical (outlets don’t actually believe anyone who enters the country illegally is a “migrant,” right?), and my gut is that the reason the term is used is to make liberal immigration policies more palatable for readers (perhaps this will be the subject of a piece one day).
That said, this woman and her young children died a terrible death. Whatever else you feel about this story, those people aren’t merely plot points. They were real, flesh and blood humans, made in the image and likeness of God, just like you and me. Please keep that in mind.
Context: This story is about illegal immigration, and the tension between various parties (the federal government, states along the border, etc.) in our immigration system.
While the topic has since moved out of public focus, in early January it was an enormous political vulnerability for Democrats in an election year. Polls repeatedly showed that it was the biggest problem facing President Joe Biden’s re-elect.
In early 2024, a Cold War of sorts between the Biden administration and the state of Texas was coming to a head. Texas had taken measures they deemed necessary to secure the border, accusing the administration of failing to uphold its responsibility in the immigration system. The admin responded by saying Texas was usurping federal authority and sued. Secession was back on the conversational docket.
Amid the standoff, CBS News reported a bombshell on January 14: three people had drowned while attempting to illegally cross the border with Mexico because troops from Texas had “barred” the individuals from escaping the rapid waters of the Rio Grande to safety.
The initial piece explicitly pointed to the wisdom of Biden’s outrage, claiming what had happened (confirmed, of course, by anonymous sources) was emblematic of what Biden had been trying to prevent. “One of the concerns raised by federal officials in a filing before the Supreme Court was that Texas' actions would prevent Border Patrol from helping migrants in distress,” the piece confidently declared.
There were problems with the central allegation, including that the Texas troops involved, from the Texas Military Department, had disputed the claims. More on that in a minute.
But those concerns didn’t appear to give pause to CBS or much of the rest of the mainstream press. The horse was out of the barn.
The Associated Press, who had initially reported the day before on the claims from Rep. Henry Cuellar (D, Tx) updated its headline from one about proximity of the deaths to one about intent, claiming Texas had directly caused the deaths — both in the new headline, and in the body of the piece, where AP’s new lede now claimed the: “U.S. Homeland Security Department said Saturday that Texas denied federal agents access to a stretch of border when they were trying to rescue three migrants who drowned.”
Similarly, the Washington Post repeated the CBS claim about intent as a headline, declaring “3 migrants drown after Texas blocks feds from part of Rio Grande, DHS says.” The picture selected for the piece drove home the point: Texas wants to harm and kill people.
That intent suggestion was everywhere. Other outlets rushed to repeat it, alleging in their headlines that rescue efforts by the federal government had been “blocked” or “barred.” Below are examples from ABC News, Guardian, NBC News (times two), Los Angeles Times, Business Insider, Axios, NPR and Al Jazeera.
Twitter tells much the same story. Outlets including Politico, NBC News, Washington Post and Reuters as well as commentators like former MSNBC host Mehdi Hassan and Atlantic journalist Jerusalem Demsas repeated the refrain. The tweets are still up as of this piece’s publishing.
Some outlets went further, not just blaming the state for the deaths but using the story to explicitly demonizing Abbot and Texas, calling it “cruel” or describing it as “inhumanity.” That included articles from Forbes, Rolling Stone and Salon.
Even outlets that were more circumspect in their headlines, like the New York Times, often included the same framing as CBS had in their initial piece. The Times’s story is chock full of quotes from Democrats and activists attacking Texas, including repeating the “physically barred” language to blame Texas. A spokesman for the Department of Homeland Security is quoted as saying Abbott’s new policies were “cruel, dangerous and inhumane.”
The facts: The press had reason to know better than to make the bold claims that peppered their headlines and framed their reporting. The Texas Military Department statement from the day before, on January 13, makes it clear that the initial claim from Rep. Cuellar (then repeated by Border Patrol) was bogus and that Border Patrol knew it. Texas troops had never interacted with anyone in the water and communicated that.
TMD was contacted by Border Patrol at approximately 9:00pm in reference to a migrant distress situation. TMD had a unit in the vicinity of the boat ramp and actively searched the river with lights and night vision goggles. No migrants were observed. At approximately 9:45pm TMD observed a group of Mexican authorities responding to an incident on the Mexico-side of the river bank. TMD reported their observations back to Border Patrol and they confirmed that the Mexican authorities required no additional assistance. At that time TMD ceased search operations. At no time did TMD security personnel along the river observe any distressed migrants, nor did TMD turn back any illegal immigrants from the US during this period. Also, at no point was TMD made aware of any bodies in the area of Shelby Park nor was TMD made aware of any bodies being discovered on the U.S. side of the border regarding this situation.
What really sunk the story, though, wasn’t what Texas said but what other voices in the Biden administration did. As part of a filing the next day in the admin’s lawsuit against Texas, Biden’s Department of Justice added a new wrinkle: Mexican authorities had told Border Patrol that the three individuals in question had died an hour before Texas had been contacted. Border Patrol had never attempted a rescue. The story told by CBS was false even in the Biden admin’s telling of events.
That evening, CBS News walked back their explosive claims, updating the piece and reverting back to a story about proximity, just as AP had initially reported. The outlet changed the piece’s headline to read “3 migrants drowned near area where Texas has denied entry to federal border agents” and added an editors note that said new information was to blame. The core editorial claim about intent had been removed entirely from the headline and the lede.
The much ballyhooed claim about agents “barred” from a rescue attempt, what turned a tragic AP story into a CBS scoop making a Republican governor into a murderer in the public mind, went down in flames.
But most of the coverage didn’t bother to correct the record — even on a subject that continued to dominate headlines and that happened mere days before the additional details came out. The headlines and tweets included above were captured on April 30th, nearly four months after new evidence had made clear the stories were false.
Now the central assertions by the outlet that first reported the inaccurate claim is milder than the media narrative that outlet created. In some cases, like Newsweek, considerably more so.
Outlets were still tweeting about the concocted story as the Biden administration was saying it didn’t happen.
Some outlets got the story closer to right from the jump, like The Hill. In a piece published the same day, January 14, the outlet framed the story in reverse: Texas denying the suggestions, rather than centering the story around them. And they included the already on-the-record statement by Texas about the incident that specifically rebutted the claims other outlets relied on.
A number of local outlets, including Texas Tribune and Houston Chronicle, also reported the story more accurately (if imperfectly) and stayed with the story as new details emerged that ran counter to the initial reporting. The Dallas Morning News ran a comprehensive and informative piece on January 17 incorporating the latest filing where the Biden admin verified Texas’s version of events and explaining what it meant about previous claims from Rep. Cuellar and others.
And there were a few mealy mouthed explainers from mainstream outlets that essentially turned the story into a he-said, she-said situation, despite the Biden administration’s admission that Texas hadn’t caused the deaths. CNN added those details but still reverted back to the Border Patrol’s broader narrative: Texas was the problem, and they were taking “actions that prevent the US Border Patrol from performing their essential missions,” including “providing humanitarian responses to individuals in need.”
The Associated Press likewise quoted the department to say that “Texas stands in the way” of Border Patrol efforts, even after acknowledging that Border Patrol’s timeline of events couldn’t be true.
But you can’t unring a bell, and lukewarm corrections and updates never get the same reach as explosive, if questionable, scoops.
The dominant media narrative from that early reporting — that Texas barred soldiers from rescuing a drowning mother and her children — is still the prevailing one.
Even today, if you Google the story, the digital history is defined by the initial, inaccurate claim.
So what: As Fox News’s Bill Melugin, an excellent reporter on the border, pointed out at the time, this smear was initially put forward by the Biden administration. The media ate up and reported what amounts to government propaganda before the truth could even get its shoes on.
It’s important to remember that at the time everyone — even the media — was hammering Biden about the border at the time. Illegal crossings kept eclipsing records. The border was a disaster.
It shouldn’t have been surprising that, amid that criticism, the Biden team would do anything to try to get a win on immigration, particularly in an election year.
And if not a win, at least a defeat for Republicans. Biden got his wish from a dubious press corp willing to believe inaccurate claims about a Republican governor. Throughout the news cycle, the focus shifted away from Biden’s porous border and the failed policies that created it.
Instead, following the “news,” CNN, Los Angeles Times, Vanity Fair and others ran opinion and think pieces about the evils of Texas’ border policies and pointed to the drowning deaths that Abbott was allegedly responsible for.
A guest essay in the New York Times two weeks later called the deaths part of Texas’s “slow-burning effort to see how far a single state can push the existing envelope before the courts push back.” The article pointed back to the Times’s uncorrected reporting repeating the “physically barred” claim in its subhead.
That same day, Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D, Tx) once again repeated the falsehood that Abbott had caused the drowning deaths.
Lost in that narrative was an important truth: Biden’s border policies, rushed into form in the initial days of his presidency in the name of humanitarian concerns, were getting vulnerable people killed. As Andrew R. Arthur, a Resident Fellow in Law and Policy at the Center for Immigration Studies explained in a piece from October 2023:
the U.N. has declared the Southwest border the “world’s deadliest migrant route” — a dubious distinction to be sure, but one America’s most popular illegal entry pathway is likely to hold for at least another year, as reports indicate that there were 148 fatalities in the Border Patrol’s El Paso sector in FY 2023 — blowing away prior years’ totals. “Advocates and academics” blame fences and checkpoints, but the real fault rests squarely on the president — and his “progressive” migrant release policies. …
Those same “progressive” Biden administration migrant release policies that Judge Wetherell blamed for the massive increase in “irregular migration” generally are also the reason why so many non-Mexican, non-Northern Triangle migrants are showing up illegally now. President Biden has put out a welcome mat to the world at the Southwest border, drawing people globally to enter — at their peril.
If the crushing fiscal impacts of its migrant-release policies on cities like New York and Chicago aren’t enough to force the Biden administration to see the inhumanity of its actions, maybe some focus on the tragic surge in border deaths will.
The tragic example from Texas, of the woman and her children who drowned in January 2024, crystalized how this was happening.
The media instead chose to turn the tragedy into a political spectacle to try to pin a horror caused by Democrats on a Republican governor.
Bigger picture: This lack of fidelity to reality comes from the same news outlets who have waged a crusade against “disinformation,” “misinformation,” and other conspiracy theories in recent years.
Not only do those “conspiracy theories” sometimes turn out not to be a conspiracy at all but the press can (and does) err in the other direction: creating their own conspiracy theories, as they did here.
And it isn’t as if the press has always accepted dubious claims from presidential administrations. These same outlets were more than happy to reject government claims from former President Donald Trump that didn’t add up to them, regardless of their veracity.
Yet even with evidence that refuted the claims the media printed as true, outlets were content to vilify a Republican governor for something he didn’t do. Rather than try to get the facts that could explain the story from sources more than willing to share them, they took the word of partisans willing to lie to score political points.
And if you were born yesterday and wanted to know what happened, you might just believe it.
Great piece (as usual). Very glad to subscribe and support.
Outstanding! When will honest reporting make a comeback on MSM? Looks like never the way things are going.