An article was posted at The Federalist today with the following headline:

“Fake News Claiming Border Checkpoints During Hurricane Harvey Is Why Americans Hate The Media“

So what is this about?

The article reports:

On Friday, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) released a grossly inaccurate and inflammatory statement in response to the unremarkable news that the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol would not close any internal checkpoints in Texas during the hurricane.

“As people seek refuge from hurricane Harvey, they are likely to have to go north or west of Texas and would have to go through a checkpoint. By keeping checkpoints open, the Border Patrol is putting undocumented people and mixed-status families at risk out of fear of deportations,” said Lorella Praeli, the ACLU’s director of immigration policy and campaigns. “This is a disgusting move from the Border Patrol that breaks with past practices. The Border Patrol should never keep checkpoints open during any natural disasters in the United States. Everyone, no matter the color of their skin or background, is worth saving.”

The problem is, there are no checkpoints in the areas affected by the storm, and no one fleeing Hurricane Harvey will encounter a Border Patrol checkpoint. The closest checkpoints are about 80 and 50 miles southwest of Corpus Christi and cover northbound routes from the Rio Grande Valley. No one fleeing the hurricane or the flooding along the coast would be headed north on these routes because they don’t lead inland to higher ground.

So basically, the statement by the ACLU is false.

Related articles in other media report similar lies:

It’s no surprise that partisan left-wing outlets like Daily Kos would run hysterical and false coverage under the headline, “Border Patrol is trying to arrest undocumented immigrants fleeing Hurricane Harvey,” but Quartz is supposed to be rather more mainstream. Timmons is Quartz’s White House correspondent and an alumnus of The New York Times and BusinessWeek. She appears to be a professional journalist and should by all accounts be credible. Yet she has written a story—in fact, re-written an ACLU press release as a legitimate news story—that has almost no credibility. How did this happen?

The article concludes:

This in turn reinforces to ordinary Americans the sense that the media has so badly lost perspective about Trump that they are willing to lie and fabricate stories in order to attack a president who is otherwise vulnerable to a plain reporting of the truth. In short, this is why Americans don’t trust the media.

No person familiar with the U.S. Constitution opposes freedom of the press. However, it would be nice if the press used that freedom to honestly report the events of the day. I don’t mind if reporting is biased, as long as the reporter admits his bias. However, outright lying is an entirely different thing. There is no relationship between anything the left-wing media is reporting about President Trump or his administration and the truth. That is a very dangerous place for our country to be. Unless Americans develop their own reliable news sources, they will be too uniformed to vote intelligently.

I am reminded of a conversation with a friend a few years ago. This friend relies strictly on The New York Times as his news source. I asked him about two stories that were relatively important. He knew nothing about either one of them. It is sad when readers of a newspaper with a legacy like The New York Times can be considered uninformed voters. Bias in the media has as much to do with what is not reported as it does with the slant of what actually is reported.