The announcement from Donald Trump’s campaign that the Republican frontrunner will “definitely not” partake in Thursday night’s Fox News debate has sent shock waves throughout the nation’s political scene.
At a press event Tuesday evening, Trump seemed to cite disparate treatment from the network as his reasoning for not participating. “What’s wrong over there, something’s wrong,” Trump said of the “games” Roger Ailes and the network are “playing.”
In asking the question of “what’s wrong over there?” Trump has shined a spotlight on one of Washington’s best kept secrets: namely, Fox’s role via its founder Rupert Murdoch in pushing an open borders agenda. The Trump campaign is a direct threat to Murdoch’s efforts to open America’s borders. Well-concealed from virtually all reporting on Fox’s treatment of Trump is the fact that Murdoch is the co-chair of what is arguably one of the most powerful immigration lobbying firms in country, the Partnership for a New American Economy (PNAE).
In addition to blanketing the country, media, and politicians with literature, advertisements, and a barrage of lobbyists pushing for open border immigration policies, the Partnership for A New American Economy (PNAE) was a prime lobbyist for one of the biggest open borders pushes in American history: Marco Rubio’s 2013 Gang of Eight immigration bill.
While Donald Trump has pledged to deport those illegally residing in the country and temporarily pause Muslim migration, Rubio’s immigration bill would have granted immediate amnesty and eventual citizenship to millions of illegal aliens, it would have doubled the annual admission of foreign workers, and it would have dispensed 33 million green cards to foreign nationals in the span of a single decade despite current record immigration levels.
While Megyn Kelly made headlines with her heated questioning of Donald Trump, not one of the Fox News anchors asked Rubio in the first Fox News debate about his signature piece of legislation, which Murdoch’s immigration lobbying firm had endorsed. Instead, they lobbed Rubio a series of softballs, such as asking Rubio if he could put God and veterans in the same sentence.
Interestingly, Bill Sammon — FOX News’s vice president of News and Washington managing editor — is the father of Brooke Sammon, who is Rubio’s press secretary.
As John McCain and Lindsey Graham told The New Yorker’s Ryan Lizza back in 2013, Fox News was essential to the Rubio-Schumer effort to expand immigration levels beyond all known historical precedent. As Lizza wrote at the time:
McCain told me, “Rupert Murdoch is a strong supporter of immigration reform, and Roger Ailes is, too.” Murdoch is the chairman and C.E.O. of News Corp., which owns Fox, and Ailes is Fox News’s president. McCain said that he, [Lindsey] Graham, [Marco] Rubio, and others also have talked privately to top hosts at Fox, including Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and Neil Cavuto… “God bless Fox,” Graham said. “Last time [i.e. during the 2007 immigration push], it was ‘amnesty’ every fifteen seconds.” He said that the change was important for his reelection, because “eighty per cent of people in my primary get their news from Fox.” He added that the network has “allowed critics to come forward, but it’s been so much better.”
Murdoch’s support of open borders immigration policies has been identified as a potential conflict of interest for years. As ABC reported in 2013:
Murdoch, Australian born and a naturalized U.S. citizen, has become an outspoken advocate for immigration reform and mass legalization of the country’s undocumented immigrants, partnering with New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg in this cause. Whether Murdoch’s personal views will percolate through his network, or at least temper criticism on the airwaves of those who don’t share it, remains to be seen.
In 2013, during the Rubio-Schumer Gang of Eight push, Mickey Kaus similarly pointed out:
In 2007, John McCain’s “comprehensive” immigrant-legalization bill failed after opponents flooded the Senate with calls, shutting down the switchboard… It won’t be that easy this time… The GOP donor class is asserting itself… One of the more influential members of this “donorist” class is Rupert Murdoch, which means that FOX News has for all intents and purposes switched sides, giving immigration “comprehensivists” a monopoly in the MSM–five networks to none.
Indeed, Murdoch has himself expressed his support for large-scale immigration. In a 2014 op-ed published in the Wall Street Journal’s open borders opinion pages, titled, “Immigration Reform Can’t Wait,” Murdoch wrote:
When I learned that House Majority Leader Eric Cantor had lost his Republican primary, my heart sank. Not simply because I think he is an intelligent and talented member of Congress, or because I worry about the future of the Republican Party. Like others who want comprehensive immigration reform, I worried that Mr. Cantor’s loss would be misconstrued and make Congress reluctant to tackle this urgent need. That would be the wrong lesson and an undesirable national consequence of this single, local election result.
In his Wall Street Journal op-ed, Murdoch echoed Rubio’s position on granting citizenship to illegal immigrants. Murdoch wrote, “We need to give those individuals who are already here… a path to citizenship.” Murdoch even decried Americans who opposed amnesty as, “nativists who scream about amnesty” — a statement which is perhaps even more significant given the fact that Murdoch is himself a beneficiary of the nation’s generous immigration policy.
Murdoch praised President Obama for showing “wise restraint” on immigration, even though, at the time of Murdoch’s writing, Obama had already implemented his first unconstitutional executive amnesty, giving away American jobs to illegal aliens — including the jobs of black Americans whose have suffered some of the greatest harms from mass immigration.
When asked about the president’s unconstitutional 2012 executive amnesty, known as Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals [DACA], Marco Rubio has said that, if he is elected president, he “wouldn’t undo it immediately.” This was another statement of Rubio’s which the Fox News anchors utterly failed to probe in their first debate to which they came loaded with questions for Trump, who — unlike Rubio — had not pushed an immigration plan backed by the network’s founder.
Murdoch also called for an unlimited number of foreign workers to fill coveted tech jobs through the H-1B visa program, which experts have described as an “indentured servitude” program:
We need to do away with the cap on H-1B visas, which is arbitrary and results in U.S. companies struggling to find the high-skill workers they need to continue growing. We already know that most of the applications for these visas are for computer programmers and engineers, where there is a shortage of qualified American candidates.
Contrary to Mr. Murdoch’s assertions, there are more than 11 million Americans with degrees in Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM) who lack employment in these fields, and U.S. schools are graduating two times more students with STEM degrees than are annually finding employment in these fields.
Here again is another undisclosed conflict of interest from Fox News. Sen. Rubio introduced legislation last year — the Immigration Innovation Act — which would have tripled H-1B visa issuances. This legislation was endorsed by Murdoch via the Partnership for a New American Economy, on whose board also sits Disney CEO Bob Iger.
Though, once again, Rubio was not questioned about the legislation by Megyn Kelly and her fellow Fox News hosts, scores of American workers in Florida Disney were terminated and forced to undergo the humiliation of training their lower-paid foreign replacements, now the subject of a lawsuit against Disney.
Mickey Kaus has long documented Fox News’s coverage of the immigration issue. As Kaus explained last year, Fox News — perhaps recognizing how at-odds its views of open borders are with its viewership (one Fox News poll reveals that Americans by a 2-to-1 margin want to see visa issuances reduced) — implemented an “immigration tamp-down,” blocking out coverage of key immigration fights in Washington D.C.
Kaus analyzed “a list of the lead story each day on Megyn Kelly’s ‘Kelly File’ show from January 14 (the day the House sent the Senate a DHS bill with a ‘rider’ blocking Obama’s amnesty) until March 3, the day the House finally caved and passed a ‘clean’ DHS bill,” and he ultimately found that immigration was not the lead story once. [See list here].
Instead, Kaus writes, “immigration was discussed as the underlying issue in the funding fight only 6 times over the whole 34 show period — and only 3 times in the crucial 20 show period that followed the Senate Dems’ initial filibuster of the Republican DHS proposal.”
Conservative columnist and best-selling author Ann Coulter has criticized the media’s fixation on ISIS to the exclusion of immigration, considering that the only way that ISIS terrorists will be able to personally carry out attacks against American citizens on American soil is if our immigration system allows them into the country.
The way media bias on immigration often manifests itself is not simply in what media outlets and anchors do cover (i.e. focusing on the needs of illegal immigrants rather than Americans), but what the don’t cover.
As any casual viewer of Fox News would observe, one sees scant to any coverage at all on the record-setting, foreign-born population inside the United States; nor coverage of census findings that immigration is about to surpass all historical records; nor stories on the total number of immigrants allowed into the country each year and the strain this number puts on education, the economy, the welfare states and the profound changes to U.S. culture. By not covering these issues in any real depth, it helps clear the way for the enactment of the Murdoch-backed immigration agenda — bringing in the New American Century hoped for by Rupert Murdoch, Marco Rubio, and Barack Obama.