Charlamagne slams corporate media for misleading public with ‘rage bait’ on Trump admin child deportations

Radio host Charlamagne Tha God criticized the corporate media Tuesday for inflaming public opinion over President Donald Trump’s administration’s deportations involving U.S. citizen children.

News outlets reported that the Trump administration deported three American children on Friday, but Secretary of State Marco Rubio on “Meet the Press” Sunday criticized the coverage as “misleading” due to its focus on the citizen children rather than the illegal status of the two mothers. Charlamagne said on “The Front Page News” segment of “The Breakfast Club” that the framing amounted to “rage bait” and warned it could backfire.

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“I do think when the media have that conversation, we can’t rage bait though. Because, you know, every time they say it, they’ll be like, ‘Oh, a 2-year-old got deported, a three-year-old got deported.’” Charlamagne said. “But they’re not telling the whole story of — their parent was here illegally, and so the parent got deported, and so they sent the child with them.”

“Because when I hear it, I’m like, why the hell would they deport a 2-year-old? Why would they deport some child with cancer? But then there’s a whole other story that goes with it,” he continued. “The only reason I think that, you know, media should be completely honest and tell the whole totality of the story is because that’s when people, you know, label things fake news.”

Co-host DJ Envy questioned whether the children are mandated to exit the U.S. or if they have the option of remaining in America with citizen family members.

“What parent would want that though?” Charlamagne responded. “You want your child.”

“A lot of parents would want their child to stay here instead of going back,” Envy said. “A lot of parents would. Absolutely positively.”

Government officials assert that the mothers made the choice to bring their kids back to Honduras with them, according to The Washington Post.

“It is common that parents want to be removed with their children,” Assistant Secretary of Homeland Security for Public Affairs Tricia McLaughlin told the Post.

“Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker referenced the Post’s reporting in her Sunday interview with Rubio. The Post’s headline for its Saturday report was “Three U.S. citizens, ages 2, 4 and 7, swiftly deported from Louisiana.”

“On the headline, that’s a misleading headline. Three U.S. citizens ages 4, 7 and 2 were not deported. Their mothers who were illegally in this country were deported,” Rubio told Welker. “The children went with their mothers. The children are U.S. citizens, they can come back into the United States if their father, or someone here, wants to assume them.”

When journalist Morgyn Wood discussed the two-year-old’s case on “Front Page News” Monday and noted the toddler’s mother was not a citizen, Charlamagne asserted he was unaware of that detail despite consuming news of the incident.

“You know what, Morgyn, I did not know. I did not know until you said it about the two-year-old. I mean, I knew about the two-year-old getting deported, but all the news reports just kept saying that a two-year-old got deported,” he said Monday. “I didn’t know that the mother had got deported because she wasn’t a citizen … I didn’t know that.”

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