Laura Ingraham on Thursday urged her audience to be careful of media manipulation and “pure propaganda” in its reporting on the three-week-old partial shutdown of the government, accusing the media of focusing on “sob stories” about affected federal employees.
“The media’s latest tactic — and we’re going to see more of it in the coming days — is to re-feature the sob stories of government workers,” Ingraham wrote in a commentary on the Fox News website. “Well, watch carefully on what they’re doing here. Rank emotional manipulation. Pure propaganda.”
Ingraham continued her critique by suggesting, without documentation, that the national press had not reported on stories of similar suffering from ordinary Americans.
“How many of these segments did they do over the years on American workers who got pushed out of entire industries as unscrupulous employers hire them for cash or at a fraction of the salary?” she asked. “How many close-up interviews of victims of illegal alien crime did they do? By the way, those people aren’t experiencing a temporary loss of income, but a permanent loss of a family member.”
The lengthy op-ed was adapted from Ingraham’s January 9 monologue from her Fox News primetime show “The Ingraham Angle.”
On Friday, the shutdown tied the 1995-96 government closure as the longest in American history — 21 days — and seems sure to surpass it by a large margin.
The president has canceled his planned trip to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, later this month in anticipation of a protracted fight over the issue.