The effects of President Trump’s immigration ban and how some try to defend it

Ryan Graham
Dr.Graspy
Persuasion
April 13, 2017

    Trump’s decision earlier this year to temporary ban refugees and immigrates from entering the united states from seven major countries in the middle east, mostly know for their Muslim population has somewhat lost the spotlight by many of the major news outlets. I recently searched up the amount of Google searches that this topic got and was surprised to see how quickly those searches dropped off. It seems like the general public mostly moved on from the issue once another major issue took it place. Perhaps that is just the nature of the news in our world today. There is, however, a few outlets that still discuss the issue, and with most news stories, competing narratives form.

    One recent news story regarding Trump’s travel ban was when a Texas attorney general came out in support for Trump’s ban. He went on to lie out “constitutional and federal statutory provisions” in attempts to defend the ban after several lawsuits had arisen opposing the ban and wanting to put an end to it. Fox News and a local NBC Texas news station reported on this with quite different ways of reporting on the story. Fox News’ coverage of the story was slightly briefer than NBC’s but explained the main topic and mainly goes into the amicus brief that was filed. (Something that I didn’t expect from Fox’s article was that they actually linked the official amicus brief for their viewers to easily find) The Texas attorney general was joined in the amicus brief by several other states. The Fox News article also goes into detail about the revised travel ban and the specific details it includes. Some of these include how the revised order clears up defining issues with some of the bans more opposed sections. The Texas attorney went on to say, “ President Trump’s revised immigration order is necessary to protect the homeland from those who wish us harm.” In general Fox’s post was short but rather informative in regards to the subject matter.

NBC’s article on this story was slightly longer than Fox’s but seemed to have left out certain detailed about the story, and included others that may not have a direct correlation to this particular story. NBC mainly goes over the same general info of the story but seems to leave out a few things. Something I noticed is that NBC barely mentions the fact that other states joined with Texas in support for the ban. This could be just because this news station is Texas based and they want to simply stick to how Texas is involved in this. NBC’s article also didn’t include any link to the actual amicus brief but instead included a link to a section of the Code of Federal Regulations, which the Texas attorney general used in his remarks. One of the biggest differences I noticed between the two articles was how the information was organized. NBC’s article was quite strange in that in between every break in a paragraph, they included links to entirely different stories. One was even about how many mumps cases were in Texas. I cannot truly understand why NBC’s article would break the flow of the news article but I feel that a major part of conflicting narratives actually lies in how the information is organized and distributed.

Sources:
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/04/10/trump-travel-ban-defended-by-15-state-coalition-led-by-texas-ag.html

http://www.nbcdfw.com/news/politics/Texas-Attorney-General-Ken-Paxton-Defends-Rejected-Trump-Travel-Ban-413865603.html

   

The Discussion of a False Story (Response)

Ryan Graham
Dr. Grapsy
Persuasion
March 22, 2017

    Thank you, doctor, for the educating comment. When I first came across this article it was when it became popular for being proven false. I wasn’t truly able to experience first hand the public outrage caused by the article other than the outrage at it being false.  I had thought about how you mention in your reply that there are sadly many stories like the one I reported on that tend to be exaggerated events that have more speculation than fact. I wanted to implement that into the main goal of my paper, which you suggested that I go into a broader examination. Perhaps I can find many of these kinds of stories and discuss the broader topic on how both sides use these kinds of stories to create public attention as you mentioned. This would allow me to not be limited by just one story and let me focus on the big picture.

    I believe that I did use the wrong words in discussing the professional media's role in all of this. When you mentioned that the idea of the media trying to push their own views on the public wasn’t accurate; I was puzzled and I wanted your input on this. You later mentioned that these media outlets are profit-driven industries that can advertise stories like the one I reported on to start a public discussion, but can’t that be seen as a way of pushing their own views? If these news outlets realize that large majorities of people do not support President Trump’s policies, then wouldn’t they perhaps be riding off on a particular group of people’s views? I guess an example would be how CNN is usually seen as left leaning and Fox as right leaning. I think I actually did include a potential example of this when Fox went to the mosque leader that originally proved the article was false. The coverage on the leader seemed to randomly include a portion where the mosque leader discussed his support of Donald Trump. This seemed quite odd to me and I wondered if this was perhaps some way of Fox trying to push the pro-Trump idea. However again, I cannot be sure, and this is only one example so I am definitely eager to hear your response to this little problem I’m having. I do want to be able to improve on my ability to discuss the media properly in my paper.

   I must admit that I didn’t put a whole lot of thought into the title of my post. I will definitely take more time to come up with an interesting and informing title. I can see how the more common practice of media outlets running a story before actually checking the facts thoroughly can be a big problem in news media today. Isn’t it the job of the news to be able to provide accurate presentations of a news story? Perhaps this can also be a topic to bring up in my paper and how the media can maybe improve their fact checking. This story was indeed picked up by multiple news publications, including, Fox and Washington Post, as well as some lesser known outlets. A large discussion did take place over on Reddit where I originally found the article. Although I believe that the discussion was more focused on the article itself and not the administration's efforts. I'll include the original link below if you are curious and want to check it out.
Thanks again for the response.

https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/5rhvvp/man_who_claimed_mom_died_in_iraq_after_trumps_ban/#bottom-comments

BLOG #1 Death Hoax

Ryan Graham
Dr. Grapsy
Persuasion
Febuary 22,2017

A news story that was reported on a few weeks ago brought up quite a bit of discussion when Mike Hager (a U.S. citizen from Iraq) blamed the death of his mother on President Trump’s immigration ban. He had traveled to Iraq to bring his sick mother back to the United States to seek treatment for an illness she contracted while visiting Iraq. Hager’s mom was a U.S. resident for 22 years, however, when Hager arrived at the airport in Iraq, she was reportedly turned away presumably by Trump’s immigration ban in that country. She died the following day. This news story seems to be truly heartbreaking and is a story that resonates with all of us who care for our family members.
    However, this story by Hager is actually false. After this story aired on Fox 2 Detroit the news station received many emails asking about the validity of Hager’s claims. Shortly after that, a leader of the Karballa Islamic Educational Center in Dearborn confirmed that Hager’s mother actually died before the executive order took place. His mother died five days before the order was confirmed.  A mosque in Detroit actually held a prayer service to remember her.
    I originally heard about this news story from a post on Reddit. This was back before the story was confirmed as fake. The original article I read was posted by the Huffington post and seemed to be targeted towards the more left-leaning audience since it included emotion quote from Hager himself. The story was constructed to get that emotional response from the reader and make them relate and feel remorse for Hager’s situation. Multiple news publications have reported on this story and had to all update and rewrite their stories to report that the story was false. These mistakes and not fact checking sources can be very dangerous for these news stations. Especially with the topic of fake news being in large debate right now.
    Fox 2 news first reported on the story when it was revealed to be false. Their article seemed to be quite detailed and showed several pieces of evidence to prove that Hager’s statement was false. Their article did not rely on emotions as much as the Huffington post article did. However, I did notice something odd about Fox News article towards the end. Out of nowhere, they bring up the fact that the leader of the mosque that confirmed Hager’s mother's death is a Trump supporter. This didn’t seem to add anything to the actual story and I was confused as to what purpose that information added to his story. Fox news is generally a right leaning news stations. So I wondered if this was them (Fox) telling its viewers “don’t worry this guy is on our side”; however, it can also be taken as something to discredit the mosque leader. If that is the cause then why does the article include a segment where they show that Hager was actually under heavy medication and still believed that everything he told Fox about his mother was true. Perhaps this is the news stations way of writing off Hager as a crazy guy. These two separate news stations have a very different way of reporting on the same story. I should also add that none of the articles that I have seen took a long time discussing the fact that this article was fake other than Fox news. Take that, as you will. The state of our media is in a very concerning place. Reporting the news is no longer the primary goal for many of these outlets. Pushing their own views seems to be more important sadly.