NewsBusters dropped a study yesterday that should embarrass every TV anchor in Manhattan, except TV anchors in Manhattan are biologically incapable of embarrassment. Geoffrey Dickens and his team counted up the evening news coverage from ABC, CBS, and NBC over the past week and found four — count them, four — separate heinous crimes committed by illegal immigrants. Beatings. Sexual assaults. Violent attacks on Americans in their own neighborhoods. All of it documented at the local level. All of it confirmed by police. All of it buried by the three networks that still call themselves ‘the news.’
And by buried, we mean zero seconds. Not ‘limited coverage.’ Not ‘brief mentions.’ Not ‘a quick update before the weather.’ Zero. As in nothing. As in Scott Pelley had more time to talk about a pigeon stuck in a Whole Foods than three networks combined had for four victims of illegal alien crime. We’d say the media has a blind spot the size of Texas, but Texas is actually where a lot of these crimes keep happening, and the networks can’t find it on a map either.
## The Local Stations Covered It — The Networks Pretended It Didn’t Happen
Here’s the part that makes your blood pressure spike. These weren’t rumors. These weren’t anonymous Twitter posts. These were stories that local ABC, CBS, and NBC affiliates — literally the same networks — ran on their local broadcasts. The Charlotte affiliate covered it. The Houston affiliate covered it. The Philly affiliate covered it. The video existed. The mugshots existed. The police reports existed. The reporters had already done the work.
All New York had to do was click a button and pipe the feed up to the national desk. That’s it. That’s the job. That’s literally what the national evening news is supposed to do — take the biggest stories from around the country and put them in front of twenty million Americans who tune in between bites of meatloaf.
Instead, they pretended it was a regional curiosity. Like a tornado in Missouri. Like a high school football scandal in Alabama. ‘Eh, not our audience. Next segment.’
## Meanwhile, Compare and Contrast
Let’s run a little thought experiment. Imagine one of these four criminals had been a white MAGA supporter who’d committed the exact same crime. Same victim. Same violence. Same police report. Same local coverage.
David Muir would’ve been wearing a black armband. Lester Holt would’ve done the cold open from the crime scene. Norah O’Donnell would’ve interviewed the victim’s third cousin twice removed. They’d have wheeled out a panel of ex-FBI agents to explain how this was the inevitable result of a Trump speech from 2017. There’d be a chyron. There’d be a hashtag. There’d be a special report with dramatic music.
But because the guy who did it crossed the Rio Grande in 2023 and was released with a court date for 2031 that he never intended to attend? Dead silence. Cue the weather map.
## The Narrative Is a Prison and They’re the Wardens
This isn’t an accident. This isn’t ‘editorial discretion.’ This is a policy. Somewhere in a glass conference room at 30 Rock, somebody with a corner office and a $3 million salary made a decision that certain stories help the cause and certain stories hurt it. Illegal alien commits a heinous crime? Hurts the cause. Kill it. Don’t even bring it up in the morning meeting.
The cause, of course, is the ongoing project to convince the American public that the border is fine, the people crossing it are all aspiring pediatric surgeons, and anybody who notices otherwise is a racist who needs to be re-educated on cable news. That’s the story. That’s the frame. That’s the sandbox everybody at these networks is required to play in if they want to keep their blow-dried jobs.
So when four actual victims show up — Americans with names and families and ER bills — and their attackers don’t fit the script, the anchors don’t get mad at the attackers. They get mad at the story. They get mad that somebody might hear about it. They get mad that NewsBusters counted the seconds and wrote it down.
## We Noticed. That’s Why They Lost.
Here’s the good news. Ten years ago this story would’ve died quietly because nobody was watching the watchers. The networks could bury whatever they wanted and the average American would never know the difference. Well, those days are over. Geoffrey Dickens has a spreadsheet. NewsBusters has a stopwatch. Twitter has receipts. And We the People have gotten very, very good at noticing when we’re being played.
Trust in network news is sitting somewhere between ‘used car salesman’ and ‘guy who wants to sell you a timeshare in Branson.’ It’s not an accident. It’s not because ‘misinformation is spreading online.’ It’s because twenty million Americans turn on the evening news, see a perfectly curated fantasy land where no illegal immigrant has ever committed a crime, flip open their phone, and within thirty seconds find the four stories the networks refused to tell them.
You can’t gaslight a country with a smartphone in every pocket. They’re still trying. It’s still not working.
## The Victims Deserve Better
The worst part of all this isn’t the bias. We’ve all learned to expect the bias. The worst part is that there are four people — real people, with lives and families and futures that just got shattered — who don’t get the dignity of their stories being told. They don’t get a candlelight vigil on the Today Show. They don’t get Robin Roberts to read their name. They don’t get a ‘special report.’ They don’t even get thirty seconds.
They get erased. By the three networks that still pretend they’re the adults in the room while they run cover for the policies that put these criminals on American streets in the first place.
We see it. We’re writing it down. And every time they pull this stunt, a few thousand more Americans cancel cable, turn off the evening news, and go find the truth somewhere else.
Keep it up, fellas. You’re doing our job for us.
