As reports of Minnesota’s Somali fraud scandals proliferate, liberal media are employing two of their favorite spin strategies to dismiss, downplay and distract from the controversy, analysis by media critic and journalist Becket Adams reveals.
In his piece, “Media leap to defend Minnesota’s Somali fraudsters — but trip over the awful truth,” published Tuesday in The New York Post, Adams dissects the media’s efforts to manipulate their audiences via two typical types of bias:
- Hostile insinuations.
- Misleading narratives.
First, Adams provides examples of how liberal media are employing their tried and true “Republicans pounce” characterization to portray conservatives as predators for pursuing justice:
- The Guardian: “The right wing has seized on fraud cases in the state.”
- ABC News: “Trump has seized on the ballooning controversy in recent days …”
- CNN: “Anxiety grips Minneapolis’s Somali community as immigration agents zero in on the Twin Cities”
“Meanwhile, a couple of newsrooms have taken a slightly different approach, arguing that the [Somali] diaspora has been an outright economic boon to the North Star State,” Adams writes, providing examples of how NPR and a local ABC affiliate have used spin to distract from the scandals and create misleading narratives favorable to Minnesota’s Somali community.
In NPR’s case, Adams writes, a reporter “assured listeners that the alleged, confirmed and pending frauds were committed by only a ‘small number of folks that don’t reflect the entire community.’” Additionally, Adams notes how the reporter made unsubstantiated claims:
“The diaspora has ‘really helped support Minnesota’s growth and businesses,’ the reporter concluded in her signoff, ‘increasing the population and helping a lot of other immigrant communities that are also here” — though her spiel included no facts or figures.’”
“Elsewhere on the local scene, a Minnesota ABC News affiliate took a similar tack, this time with some hard numbers, headlined: ‘Somali Minnesotans drive economic growth, pay $67M taxes annually,’” Adams writes, introducing a report by KSTP-TV.
However, scrutiny of the very statistics cited by KSTP actually dispel the report’s narrative, Adams explains. For example, Adams calculates that the $67 million paid by Minnesota Somalis comes to only about $630 per-capita in state and local tax contribution, while the average Minnesota taxpayer paid more than $8,000.
What’s more, “at least 46% of Minnesota’s Somali community lives [sic] below the federal poverty threshold, making them eligible for SNAP, Medicaid, subsidized housing and other public benefits,” Adams writes. As a result, the Somali community is taking far more from the state than it’s contributing.
Instead of citing numbers that accidentally refute their narrative, liberal media would be better off sticking to producing fluff pieces that flatter Minnesota’s Somalis, Adams muses in conclusion.
