Watch the pivot foot

Here’s the No. 5 story from the Fair ‘n’ Balanced homepage Wednesday night to help explain why attitude change is often the wrong place to look for media effects — because who needs attitude change when you’re in charge of the tollbooth through which “objective” information itself is transmitted?

News agencies seem to agree that hostile foreign actors shouldn’t be clowning around in US elections, so the issue itself isn’t in question. Indeed, the event is more salient at CNN (which — imagine — is also covering the Federal Reserve, Near Eastern political violence and other stuff that doesn’t make the Fox top ten) than at Fox, and it gets thorough play at the AP. But see if there’s a bit of a difference in the information you get from the headlines:

Iranian hackers tried but failed to interest Biden’s campaign in stolen Trump info, FBI says (AP)

Iranian hackers sent stolen Trump campaign information to people associated with Biden campaign (CNN)

Somehow, these don’t seem to add up to “sharing.” You’re learning about the same event, but you’re learning different things about it. Here’s a bit from the texts:

The agencies noted that there is currently no information indicating if recipients replied to the messages. (Fox)

There is no indication that Biden’s staff ever replied, the statement says. (CNN)

You can see it happening in any busy newsroom: Hey, “if” and “that” mean the same thing (right?), and “if” is only half the length, and presto! Except — think of the if/whether distinction — they really aren’t built to transmit the same kind of information.

Another bit of data is somewhat less subtle. CNN and the AP include comments from both the Trump and Harris campaigns. Fox includes a comment from Trump himself — like the poor influencers who took Russia’s money without knowing it, he’s certainly an aggrieved party here — but waives the routine of balancing. As it might with a cop story, that doesn’t mean there’s no rule, but it does suggest that there are rules about applying the rule.

And that’s the beauty of the framing/agenda-setting process. Given different maps through what looks like an identical thicket, you can end up in some strikingly different places.

 

From your lipskis to God's ear

 Unless you get all your news from the Fair 'n' Balanced homepage, you might have run across an amusing tale of Russian intrigue on Wednesday. Here's the AP's follow-up from Thursday: 

They have millions of followers online. They have been major players in right-wing political discourse since Donald Trump was president. And they worked unknowingly for a company that was a front for a Russian influence operation, U.S. prosecutors say.

An indictment filed Wednesday alleges a media company linked to six conservative influencers — including well-known personalities Tim Pool, Dave Rubin and Benny Johnson — was secretly funded by Russian state media employees to churn out English-language videos that were “often consistent” with the Kremlin’s “interest in amplifying U.S. domestic divisions in order to weaken U.S. opposition” to Russian interests, like its war in Ukraine. 

And a nod to CNN for first putting 2 and 2 and 2 together to get six. But back to the AP: 

... The U.S. Justice Department doesn’t allege any wrongdoing by the influencers, some of whom it says were given false information about the source of the company’s funding. Instead, it accuses two employees of RT, a Russian state media company, of funneling nearly $10 million to a Tennessee-based content creation company for Russia-friendly content. 

After the indictments were announced, both Pool and Johnson issued statements on social media, which Rubin retweeted, saying they were victims of the alleged crimes and had done nothing wrong.

No doubt it's a relief to know that even in the eyes of the Justice Department, you're suspected of nothing more than being -- oh, if only there was a Soviet-era phrase that has regained currency with the foamy-mouthed American right! -- a useful idiot.

The conservative press was historically hawkish on Kremlin (or, if you read Col. McCormick's Tribune, Whitehall) disinformation operations. A favorite during my brief sentence in the right-wing media was the purported rumor that the AIDS virus had been invented in a lab at Fort Detrick, with the story exported to a willing outlet somewhere in the back of beyond, only to resurface in the West as "NEW REPORT CLAIMS!" But Fox News, perhaps with a Trumpian RUSSIA RUSSIA RUSSIA from Truth Social echoing in its ears, was understandably not eager to rush into things. Here is its first report, appearing Thursday afternoon:

President Biden’s Department of Justice (DOJ) announced new efforts to crack down on Russian election interference on Wednesday, but Republicans say they are "skeptical" of the new moves so close to the November election. 

"We’ve seen this before. In 2016, the same people pushed the Russia hoax and we now know it was totally bogus.* Now, it may be true this time, but I am extremely skeptical," House Judiciary Chairman Jim Jordan, R-Ohio, told Fox News Digital. 

The other main source is the equally prudent Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. Oddly missing from this text, though, is the Voice of the People: the bluff little guys whose social media streams are always handy when the internet needs to Explode or Catch Fire, or some executive branch policy or hapless school administrator needs to be Roasted or Mocked or Blasted.

Methodological time out here. I'm drawing on a data set of four captures a day of the top 10 stories on the Fox homepage. That provides a clear agenda-setting hierarchy: an identifiable top story and nine more arranged beneath it** before you get to the sponsored content. Stories are coded for date, time, image, headline and subhead, source, stickiness (how long they stay in place and a few other variables. Social media (it's 2024, after all) is a frequent source. This can be a single tweet by an Elon Musk or a Bill Ackman, an announcement of a sports retirement or a celebrity breakup, or -- my favorite -- the "Biden blasted" (or "Outrage as..." in the UK-styled example at top) story. That's where the bullpen of usual suspects comes in.

And who should be providing the outrage for Biden's insult to Easter? 

Conservative commentator Benny Johnson shared a screenshot of the White House statement, writing alongside it, "What a slap in the face to all Christians in America…"

This was in the No. 3 spot on the homepage March 30. A Google search shows nine other Fox stories mentioning Comrade Johnson in the past year. (One, you'll note, is another late-breaking -- as in, posted at 7 p.m. Thursday -- "we're the real victims here" story.)

Google shows nine Dave Rubin videos at Fox since the beginning of the year, and he's mentioned in a number of stories as well. You might remember this one, which reached the No. 10 spot on the homepage on May 15:  

"How is this real life?" commentator Dave Rubin asked.

Tim Pool often appears as an interviewer or host (of RFK Jr. and Vivek Ramaswamy), but he's also a source. Here's the top story from early afternoon March 19:

"This is not funny This lady is dangerous," podcaster Tim Pool wrote.

None of these say "vote for Trump." They don't have to. Two decades into the agenda-setting enterprise, McCombs and Shaw noted that attitude change is often the wrong place to look for media effects; the bigger deal is political learning. If the goal is to lower the president's approval among US voters (as it appears to have been), learning that the president hates your religion and appoints people you can't trust is a pretty good outcome. If you want people to learn that Ukrainian resistance is useless, help them learn that Ukraine's US supporters live on a different planet.

Again, the useful idiots say that they're crime victims too, and that they never surrendered editorial control over any of the propaganda they produced. It would be churlish not to take them at their word. At the same time, there's no reason to think that the Russians aren't careful shoppers who know a bargain when they see one -- regardless of who writes the scripts.

* No it wasn't.
** You might have learned a "reading Z" in your editing class, or you might not. I don't judge.

What makes a top story at Fox

Frontpage news decisions -- for those of you who remember front pages -- aren't Telexed down from Sinai each night at 9:30 (for those of you who remember morning newspapers with "news"). They're made by small groups of people applying roughly equal amounts of arithmetic and witchery to a stack of reconstructions of the day's events, aiming to catch the audience's attention by explaining (a) what's new about what you don't know in the context of (b) why everything you already know is still true. The Fox News homepage -- above is the lead story from early Saturday evening -- doesn't necessarily show a different planet, but it does follow a very different map around the planet you woke up on, depending on what's plugged into the equation and how the "calculate" button is pressed.

That's more or less what drove the front pages in Max McCombs' and Donald Shaw's 1972 "The agenda-setting function of mass media." (This one's from Raleigh on the first day of the study.) Broadly following the textbook's list of news factors -- conflict, timeliness, impact, proximity, oddity and so on -- editors across town in neighboring cities could disagree radically about whether Nixon or Humphrey should save the country while agreeing that (a) the election is the top story and (b) Nixon is a bigger deal today because he's right down the road. Faraway places are most important when Americans are there, but an airline crash is still frontpage news if it's on a distant continent (ideally one with high proportions of white people, but you get the idea). This is issue salience, which combined with attribute salience -- whose fault the economy is, if "the economy" is the top story -- makes up the media agenda that the audience learns from

The Fox decision-makers are working in a different millennium and on a palette beyond the ken of the 1968 audience, but they're using a familiar set of tools. So what makes a top story in the sunny uplands of August 2024? It's still the elction, but ...

MSNBC host Chris Hayes fumed over new poll results showing former President Trump as the favorite to win the Electoral College and therefore the presidency in November.

Spoilers: The writer is a Fox associate editor whose beat seems to consist mainly of monitoring Twitter to see (a) what the good guys are saying about the bad guys (the "Twitter blows up" story) and (b) what the bad guys have been up to while you weren't watching. As in 1968, "the election" is still the top issue; on Saturday, it's driven by an actor from the bad side who's -- well, acting out on Twitter about news that's supposedly favorable to the good side.

On his X account Friday, the "All in With Chris Hayes" anchor blasted recent poll results from famed pollster Nate Silver showing that Harris would most likely beat Trump in the national popular vote if the election were held today, though Trump would win the Electoral College.

So clearly not a "this just in" story, but let's flash back to the headline for a moment. The who-did-what-to-whom clause is about an anchor who's enraged, but the "why" is in the prepositional phrase: "polls showing Trump would win." This, kids, is simply fictional. That’s not what “recent poll results” show, that's not what Nate Silver released, and Silver is a guy who messes with data to model election results, not a "pollster." (Our writer admits as much later: "The poll Hayes expressed frustration over was Silver’s latest election model.") This model, as Fox reported (ahem) Thursday, shows Harris more likely to win the popular vote but Trump with a 52.4% likelihood of winning the Electoral College. Make what you will of a model by someone who thinks a “polling day” is a thing, but back to our real point, which is the MSNBC anchor quote-tweeting a post about the Silver model:

"It’s clear as day the Electoral College is, to quote the great Justice Jackson a national suicide pact," Hayes posted.

The media pundit’s statement referenced a quote from Supreme Court Justice Robert Jackson, who wrote in 1949 that the Supreme Court "will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact" if it doesn’t balance its "doctrine logic with a little practical wisdom."

The snippets are from Jackson’s dissent in Terminiello v Chicago, though Fox omits a lot of the contextually fun stuff that — oddly — seems to presage the peaceful and patriotic protests of Jan. 6: “This Court has gone far toward accepting the doctrine that civil liberty means … that all local attempts to maintain order are impairments of the liberty of the citizen. The choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either. There is danger that, if the Court does not temper its doctrine logic with a little practical wisdom, it will convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact.”

So how does a lone day-old tweet from an anchor at a rival network, presented in a breathless text that bollixes up dubious data from an even older tweet, become OUR TOP STORY? Because the bad guys hate the Constitution, and POLLING GURU SAYS the Constitution is about to return our hero to his rightful position (at least, once the story has been worked over by a more senior writer), and the liberals’ delusions are dissolving in tears of rage, and there you have it. Almost makes one wish for some nice uncomplicated coups and earthquakes, to steal a better title.

Just go ahead and say 'CACKLE!!!'

OK, if your question is "Does the Times have its thumb so far up its own ass it could pick its nose from inside?", the answer is an unqualified "yes." But it's not as bad as it looks! National Review editor Rich Lowry is actually trying to offer some theory-based advice:

For as long as Mr. Trump has been in the ascendancy in the G.O.P., he will go off on some pointless tangent and Republicans will urge him — perhaps as they hustle down a corridor of the U.S. Capitol* — to talk about the economy instead of his controversy du jour.

A close cousin of this perpetual advice is the admonition that Mr. Trump should concentrate more on the issues in this campaign. Neither recommendation is wrong, but they are insufficient to making the case against Kamala Harris.

Presidential races are won and lost on character as much as the issues, and often the issues are proxies for character. Not character in the sense of a candidate’s personal life, but the attributes that play into the question of whether someone is suited to the presidency — is he or she qualified, trustworthy and strong, and does he or she care about average Americans?

Time out for a quick summary of Bill Benoit's functional theory of political communication. Campaigns are about winning, and campaign messages are focused on making the audience compare you favorably with the other guy. Messages do this with one of three functions -- acclaim (why you're good), attack (why the other candidate is rotten) or defense (why you're not as rotten as the other candidate says you are) -- using one of two topics: policy or character. Comparing how function and topic proportions vary by incumbency, ethnicity, gender, level of office, national political culture and so forth can be a pile of fun.

Presidential races, in this sense, are deeply personal; they usually involve disqualifying the opposing candidate, rather than convincing voters that his or her platform is wrongheaded.

But this gets things confused. Attacks aim to "disqualify" the other candidate, but they're not definitionally more effective -- or more attack-y -- if they aim at character rather than policy. Attacks can address qualifications ("my opponent spent a mere six months as dog-catcher") or personal shortcomings ("my opponent is a felonious old sex offender"). And Lowry hasn't explained how he would support his claims about the empirical world of measurable data.**

... Mr. Trump isn’t going to beat Ms. Harris by scoring points in the debate over price controls or the border.

Everything has to be connected to the deeper case that Ms. Harris is weak, a phony, and doesn’t truly care about the country or the middle class.*** The scattershot Trump attacks on Harris need to be refocused on these character attributes.

To wit: Ms. Harris was too weak to win the Democratic primary contest this year. She was too weak to keep from telling the left practically everything it wanted to hear when she ran in 2019. She is too weak to hold open town-hall events or do extensive — or, at the moment, any — sit-down media interviews.

None of which bear on the idea of fitness for the high office once held by (ahem) Donald Trump. But there's more!

… Mr. Trump isn’t ever going to become a buttoned-up campaigner who sticks closely to script. There will inevitably be lots of static and wasted time and opportunities. But there’s plenty of room for Mr. Trump, as he insists he must, to do it his way, and still get a better handle on the campaign.

One of his talents as a communicator is sheer repetition, which, when he’s on to something that works, attains a certain power. Everyone knew in 2016 that he wanted to build a wall and have Mexico pay for it. It would be quite natural for him, if he settled on this approach, to call Ms. Harris “weak” 50 times a day.

For (ahem) empirical analysis, those would be acclaim/policy and attack/character. This coding scheme doesn't get into whether a policy claim is an out-and-out lie, but you may draw your own conclusions about Lowry's values on that question. 

He has also, in the past, been able to pithily and memorably nail core weaknesses of his opponents. His nicknaming may be a schoolyard tactic, yet it has often been effective tool, whether it was “Crooked Hillary” (underling Hillary Clinton’s ethical lapses) or “Little Marco” (diminishing a young primary opponent who lacked gravity). Even people who don’t like Trump or his nicknames would end up using these sobriquets.

The Times is right, in its own little way: Trump can't win by saying "nonfarm payroll job creation," but he could win by bellowing "CACKLE!!!" -- or "PANTSUIT!!!" or "MARXIST!!!" -- as often as the moderators let him. And that seems to be the point of Lowry's advice.

* I didn't say Lowry was going to magically turn into a good writer overnight, did I?
** Or that he was no longer prone to randomly making things up.
*** Or that Bill Buckley wouldn't slap him upside the head for the parallel structure fault. 

Style wars

 
This isn't just another cautionary tale from the opinion pages of America's Newspapers®. Look a bit more closely and you'll find a familiar right-wing complaint: If you people in the media won't help us be a little more racist, it's going to go ill for you. Here's Douglas Murray in the New York Post:

If one of your allies starts to fall apart, you should notice it. And learn why.

This past week, Great Britain has been racked with riots and disorder. In Northern Ireland, Protestants and Catholics even came out to riot alongside each other for once.

At Fox News, corporate bedmate of the Post, this was "some of the worst unrest in the United Kingdom's history." (Oh, child.)

What has gone on has huge lessons for America. (Yes. And one of those lessons might be found in the proportion of Britons who turned out to say, in effect, we're not having any of that.) And our politicians here should take note.

The disorder in Britain began after three girls, ages 6, 7 and 9, were stabbed to death as they took part in a Taylor Swift-themed dance party. In the immediate aftermath, locals in Southport were shocked, angry and looking for someone to blame.

In the UK, as in America, the authorities do not just release information about suspects and culprits. They “manage” the release.

In Britain, as in America, if there is believed to be a racial component to a crime, the authorities are even more careful about what information comes out.

It might have been a while since Douglas Murray tended to the police beat. Neither Fox News nor the local affiliates that provide so much of its episodic crime coverage seem to have any trouble finding and publishing the ethnicity of crime suspects on short notice.

But the British public, like Americans, are used to this process. And the longer they sense information is being kept from them, the angrier they can get.

This time the authorities were clearly holding back something about the identity of the suspect. Soon rumors went around online. All from completely unreliable sources. But they caught on.

A rumor went around that the attacker was a Muslim who had only arrived recently with one of the illegal boatloads of migrants who keep pouring into southern Britain.

In fact, although there have been plenty of crimes and terrorism committed by illegals, this was not such a case.

This time, the person who carried out this appalling crime was the 17-year-old son of Rwandan migrants. His motive is not yet known.

See? It's all your fault, media. If only you'd told us it was a UK-born Black guy in the first place, we wouldn't have had to attack all those mosques and hotels!

Time out for the stylebook here. It's a widely accepted, if fairly recent, principle of style that matters like ethnicity and gender aren't supposed to be attached to people unless they're clearly relevant to the story. That implies a stylistic consistency that isn't there in real life: for example, the 1942 textbook that says, on one page, "it does no good to mention under certain circumstances that a Negro committed assault," then a few chapters laters offers NEGRO ATTACKS WIFE as an example of how to cram the "essentials" into a tight headline count.

As with many style points, knowing the rule isn't nearly as interesting as figuring out who gets to break it under what circumstances. Your shop might have a firm rule that it's not a "miracle" until God confirms it by phone*, but everybody knows which Star Reporter can blow past that stop sign without mussing a hair. More relevant are the examples that "everyone" understands because they meet the Man Bites Dog rule of tabloid days; that's why "male nurse" and "female drunken driving suspect" still populate the general news pages, and why, in the right-wing press, the headline tells you to blame a "nonbinary Biden official," not one of the boring old binary ones.

Now, it's not always the cops', or the press's, job to prove the negative. When the mob knows damn well it was nine-legged Muslim ammonia beings from Planet Mxyzptlk because it says so RIGHT HERE ON MY PHONE, they probably have other things to do (putting out fires, for example) than tell you "nah, it's a Black guy from some unspellable place in Wales." So in a way, following a rule -- even once it's been overtaken by the commonsense idea that the "complete physical description"** of stylebooks gone by is irrelevant when the perp is already in custody -- is beside the point. Our columnist has a bigger point in mind: 

But all this happened in a very dangerous context. And it is one that American politicians would do well to understand. Even if their British counterparts fail to.

In the UK — perhaps even more than in America — there is great dislike of the rule-breaking illegal migration.

... The authorities house the illegals in hotels (sound familiar?), and in short, absolutely nothing is done to punish people for breaking the law by breaking into the country.

Put a Smokey Bear hat, some mirrored sunglasses and a dime-store Southern accent on Douglas Murray, in short, and you can almost hear him saying "Reckon he done stole more chains than he could swim with."

* Or a "tragedy" unless someone kills their stepdad by the fifth act. I've got a million of 'em. Don't forget your server, folks!
** The idea here was that if it wouldn't help the cops, or the public, identify the baddies-at-large, it was irrelevant. As an editor I used to work for put it, "two Black men with sticks" doesn't count.

Fox and the rules of news

 

A brief lesson on how the Rules of News® work, by way of explaining how the public agenda is set by the homepage of the Fair 'n' Balanced Network.

The Fox homepage has a clear agenda-setting hierarchy: 10 top stories, with a clearly identifiable lead and the rest in an easy top-to-bottom, left-to-right layout, before you get to the promotional content. Here's the No. 6 story as of 11 a.m. Eastern US time (it's moved up a notch since 8 a.m.). 

Time -- the "THIS JUST IN!!!" -- element -- has been a central component of news ever since we had to out-shout the balladeer on the next corner in Elizabethan London. In US headline dialect, the time rules are well established. The present tense ("removes") signals the "immediate past": the "since Thursday's edition" or "since we updated the homepage" that tells you why today is different from yesterday. That's part of a bundle of practices that, in turn, help the audience sort events into issues. In basic agenda-setting terms, that's how "the news" tells the audience whether a campaign stop is "about" crime, the economy, foreign policy or whether the candidate laughs at the wrong time.

Here, the time element helps us sort this into a "culture war" basket: An "airline" has added to a set of daily outrages against the icons of American life that indicate -- oh, what's the phrase? -- a "nation in decline." Except that Fox is cheating. Watch the pivot foot: 

Over the last few years, Delta Air Lines has embraced the diversity, equity and inclusion agenda under the purview of a chief officer who believes that the phrase "ladies and gentlemen" isn't inclusive. 

Delta's Chief Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Social Impact Officer Kyra Lynn Johnson has said publicly Delta is striving to "boldly pursue equity" which has impacted every level of the company, from its hiring practices to the language it uses in gate announcements. 

"So we're beginning to take a hard look at things like our gatehouse announcements. You know, we welcome ‘ladies and gentlemen.’ And we've asked ourselves, ‘Is that as gender inclusive as we want to be?’" Johnson said during a February 2021 panel with other DEI insiders. "You know, we're looking at some legacy language that exists in some of our employee manuals. And getting to the root of the way some things are described and saying, ‘Does that actually send a message of inclusivity?’"

Delta released an inclusive language guide in December 2020 which advised employees and leaders against using terms that reinforce the notion that there are only two genders.

See the move? We've gone from "THIS JUST IN!!!" to a panel discussion in 2021. Nothing in the text, even the comments Delta provided to the inquiring Fox reporter, indicates that a decree has gone out from Caesar Diversus to stop saying "ladies and gentlemen." If you're a reader, you have a right to be annoyed -- though if you're a Fox reader, you might more likely be filled with existential dread, because that's the proper slot on the agenda.

An important takeaway from the agenda-setting enterprise is that agenda-setting isn't a practice; it's an outcome of practice. The "media agenda" is what happens when practitioners commit journalism on Lippmann's "blooming, buzzing confusion" of daily events. Fox isn't really a different world; it's a different map with HERE BE GERBLINS drawn in different places.

Today in random fearmongering

 Dear local fishwrap:

If you want me to take the bait in your lede seriously:

Four men from Chile were charged last week in connection with robberies and assaults at two jewelry stores in Oakland County, according to police in Auburn Hills and Troy.

Try not to knock it down in the second graf:

The charges, involving retail stores, don't match the scenario of "transnational gangs" targeting upscale houses, as described in a recent warning by Oakland County Sheriff Michael Bouchard.

But ... but ... there's still a trend here, right?

On Thursday, Oct. 5, President Joe Biden said he was suspending federal regulations to allow adding about 20 more miles to the controversial border wall begun by the Trump administration, although Biden said he was required by law to approve the construction and did so reluctantly. On Oct. 1, the governor of New York, a Democrat, told CBS’s “Face the Nation” she strongly favored a tighter border.

“It is too open right now,’’ Gov. Kathy Hochul said of the U.S. border with Mexico, where an estimated 200,000 to 260,000 migrants entered the U.S. in September alone, according to national reports.

On Sept. 29, Bouchard issued a warning about migrants that made national news in conservative media. Bouchard warned of “transnational gangs” of migrants, which he said were breaking into upscale houses that back up to golf courses and wooded areas in Oakland County and elsewhere, although he said he couldn’t reveal whether any such suspects had been arrested in metro Detroit. 

True enough, in its own way. "Conservative media" (citing a Detroit TV station) even quoted the sheriff as saying a similar gang (similar to what, neither he nor the tabloid Post indicated) had struck in New York. “'They typically hit homes from 5 to 9 p.m., they seem to want houses where nobody’s home, and they usually come in through windows in the back,' the sheriff added."

But that doesn't deter (sorry) the local paper:

The four Chilean men arraigned last week in Oakland County have been charged with crimes that don’t fit Bouchard’s scenario but their arrests still add to unease about migrants. The four were charged with armed robbery, felonious assault, and malicious destruction at two jewelry retailers. The charges came after two smash-and-grab strikes, one at the MJ Diamonds store inside Great Lakes Crossing Outlets in Auburn Hills at 4:30 p.m. on Aug. 11, a second at the jewelry department inside Macy’s at Oakland Mall in Troy at 5:42 p.m. on Aug. 24, according to Auburn Hills police. 

True and -- OK, let's be charitable and say "crudely speculative in the manner of 'conservative media,'" respectively. In other words, they're unlikely to "add to unease about migrants" unless you tell people to add it to their unease. And if you're wondering why a robbery in August is related to a Biden statement nearly eight weeks later, hold that thought:

... Officers who investigated the robbery at Great Lakes Crossing Outlets decided the likely getaway vehicle was a black Kia Soul. Its ownership was traced to Aguilar-Mondaca.* Those officers notified the FBI/Oakland County Gang and Violent Crime Task Force, whose members include investigators from Auburn Hills and Troy police. They began conducting surveillance at Oakland Mall. Surveillance on Aug. 24 showed three subjects, all wearing masks, arriving in a black Kia Soul to enter Macy’s.

So someone owning reasonably spiffy SUV had it registered somewhere in or near the second-wealthiest county (by median income) in Michigan, and the cops set up surveillance at another mall, and ... tell me how this is related to the conservative-media-stoked "unease"?

In the days before the Oakland County sheriff issued his warning about gangs of migrant thieves, a nationwide coalition of sheriff departments — the American Sheriff Alliance — met in San Diego to issue a “call for action at the border due to the heightened threat picture,” the group said in a news release. The release said that the swelling torrent of migrants had brought a 906% increase in “individuals found to be on the Terrorist Watch List” since 2017, “and there are still three months left in 2023” to increase that number. 

If you're forming an impression that these characters -- and we can go ahead and repeat that they're charged in two violent armed robberies -- appear to have little to do with either the "swelling torrent" or the Terrorist Watch List, that seems fair. It's very much the impression given by the story, and it seems rather a shame that someone didn't notice that mismatch before hitting the "publish" button on this bit of random fearmongering.

* One of the suspects, but you've probably figured that out.