November 5, 2018

Even Fox News Is Rejecting Trump’s Anti-Immigrant Campaign Ad

Facebook, Fox News, and NBC are no longer running an ad that compares migrants to criminals.

U.S. President Donald Trump delivers a campaign speech for governor candidate of Georgia Brian Kemp who is Secretary of State in Macon, Georgia on November 4, 2018. ( The Yomiuri Shimbun via AP Images )Daisuke Tomita/AP

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.

Facebook, Fox News, and NBC will no longer run an ad from President Donald Trumpā€™s 2020 reelection campaign, widely perceived as racist, that portrays Latino immigrants as criminal invaders.

The Trump ad features Luis Bracamontes, an undocumented immigrant convicted of killing two California sheriffā€™s deputies in 2014, before cutting to images to members of the migrant caravan who are walking toward the United States. The ad calls the caravan an “invasion.” As Mother Jones has reported, caravan members are weeks away from the United States, and there is no reason to believe they will overwhelm border officials, nor is there evidence that it’s full of criminals, as the president has repeatedly claimed.

Fox Newsā€™ decision to stop running the ad comes after the channel’s anchors and guests speculated baselessly about whether members of the caravan will bring crime and disease to the United States. David Ward, a retired Border Patrol agent, said on Fox News last week that caravan members could bring smallpox to the United States. Ward appeared to be unaware that smallpox was eradicated decades ago.

NBCā€™s decision to pull the ad comes one day after the network aired it on Sunday Night Football, which drew 21 million viewers. An NBC spokesman said on Monday, “After further review we recognize the insensitive nature of the ad and have decided to cease airing it across our properties as soon as possible.”

It is unclear why any further review was necessary. CNN refused to air the ad in the first place and made it clear over the weekend that it believes the ad is racist.

Facebook decided to block paid distribution of the ad after Fox News and NBC pulled it. A company spokesman said in a statement, ā€œThis ad violates Facebook’s advertising policy against sensational content so we are rejecting it. While the video is allowed to be posted on Facebook, it cannot receive paid distribution.ā€ The Trump campaign spent between $27,00 and $94,000 to promote the ad on Facebook, and it was seen by up to 5 million users, according to Facebook data reviewed by the Daily Beast.

Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale attacked CNN, Facebook, and NBC for not running the ad. ā€œThe #FakeNewsMedia and #PaloAltoMafia are trying to control what you see and how you think,ā€ he wrote on Twitter on Tuesday. Parscale did not mention the rejection from Fox News.

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who wonā€™t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its futureā€”you.

And we need readers to show up for us big timeā€”again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate