Most national media outlets, including Vox, have reported on the caravan, an approximately 4,000-strong group of migrants, mostly from Honduras, who have chosen to collectively flee to the United States to escape gang violence and political instability. But CBN’s reporting — including the implication that “leftists,” including the billionaire philanthropist George Soros, were secretly funding the caravan in order to destabilize American democracy in time for the midterms — is not substantiated by reporting by any mainstream media outlet.
Yet CBN consistently stoked fears in several articles that “radical leftists” were behind the caravan, and that it was full of “felons” and “exotics” — one of its sources’ terms for migrants of Middle Eastern or African origin. Little attention, if any, was paid to migrants’ reasons for leaving their homes behind, or the social and political instability in Honduras that is attracting the travelers to the United States. (CBN has not responded to an emailed request for comment.)
The nativist rhetoric spouted by outlets like the Christian Broadcasting Network and plenty others has proved toxic. Elsewhere, intimations of Soros-related conspiracy theories have proven fatal. A Pittsburgh man is suspected of fatally shooting 11 people at a synagogue in Squirrel Hill on Saturday. He frequently posted nativist sentiments and anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about the caravan and other political issues on the far-right social networking site Gab. In one post, he apparently blamed Jews for aiding and abetting “invaders” — meaning the Honduras migrant caravan.
