"Trump defiant as crisis grows over family separation at the border."

That's the headline at The Washington Post, with this video of Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen vigorously defending Trump's policy:



From the article:

The president on Monday voiced defiance and continued to falsely blame congressional Democrats for what he decried as a “horrible and tough” situation. But Trump is empowered to immediately order border agents to stop separating families as a result of his “zero tolerance” enforcement policy.

The insertion of the word "falsely" is such a distracting signal that WaPo doesn't want to be looked upon as neutrally professional journalism. If what Trump is saying is wrong for some reason, that should be brought out, with factual statements, somewhere else in the story. I also don't like "voiced defiant" (or, from the headline, "Trump defiant"). For one thing, it purports to know his state of mind. For another, it refers to something that he's defying before setting up what that is. We're dropped into the middle of things, and Trump is all emotional and spouting lies. I feel like I'm reading a pulp fiction novel.

The president asserted that the parents illegally crossing the U.S.-Mexico border with their children “could be murderers and thieves and so much else,” echoing his incendiary remarks about immigrants at his campaign launch in 2015. And in a series of dark tweets, he warned that undocumented immigrants could increase gang crime and usher in cultural changes.

“The United States will not be a migrant camp, and it will not be a refugee holding facility,” Trump said in a midday speech. “You look at what’s happening in Europe, you look at what’s happening in other places. We can’t allow that to happen to the United States. Not on my watch.”

So he's doing more of the kind of talk that won him the election in 2016. What makes Democrats in politics and the media believe it will work out differently this time? Big bets are being made on which high-emotion scenario will capture the hearts of voting Americans. I wish this were not forefronted as the issue for 2018. Whatever happened to the IG's report or North Korea or — for that matter — Russia collusion and impeachment?

The crisis garnered round-the-clock television news coverage, with journalists reporting about their first glimpses of the ­concrete-floor and metal-cage conditions inside the detention centers.

So no human beings were making the decision to devote round-the-clock coverage of this issue. The "crisis" did the acting. The abstraction — there's that bullshit word — garnered the coverage.

Nielsen acknowledged that she was not keeping pace with coverage of the crisis, including audio of wailing children published a few hours earlier by ProPublica....

As if her job is to monitor the media, and how to enforce the law should be determined by what video has been chosen to run on television. Nielsen should have her own accurate sources and should work on performing her duties, not spend her time consuming journalism/propaganda and continually modify what she is doing in response to the imagined mood of the country. The test will come when the elections arrive, more than 4 months from now. Will crying, "caged" children fill our TV screens that long?

Trump has been closely monitoring the coverage...

Yeah, Trump, who we've been told spends too much time watching television.

... but has been suspicious of it...

LOL. That's what he does.  Watches TV suspiciously. If you're going to watch the news on TV — a horrible practice (I can't stand it) — that's what you should do, watch suspiciously.

... telling associates he believes that the media cherry-picks the most dramatic images and stories to portray his administration in a negative light, according to one senior administration official.

Well, of course. What competent watcher of television would not conclude that the images are cherry-picked for drama? As for negativity to the Trump administration, can you be a competent TV watcher and believe the concern here really is purely for the welfare of children?

Meanwhile, Trump and his advisers were unable to stanch the wellspring of public opposition. 

I'm skeptical of the phrase "wellspring of public opposition." There are surveys — the article refers to a CNN poll and a Quinnipiac poll showing 67/68% of Americans disapprove of separating children from parents — but I suspect that millions of Americans want what they voted for in 2016, which is strong immigration enforcement, and these people may not want to talk about the innocents who get hurt along the way and they may embrace the idea (that Nielsen stated clearly) that the children are being hurt by the adults who are taking them on a dangerous, criminal journey or suspect that many of these children are not so young and are already involved in gang violence and will bring more of that violence into the United States. What about that wellspring of public sentiment?

By the way, "stanch the wellspring" is a mixed metaphor. "To stanch" is to stop the flow of blood or other fluid from a wound in a living body. A "wellspring" is the source of a river emerging from the ground. These are emotive, colorful words, but they have concrete meaning and they're being used in a way that makes no sense.*

Some Republican elected officials joined Democrats in expressing moral outrage and calling for an immediate end to the administration’s family separation policy.

Are these people saying that what they want is that the adults who arrive with children and make a claim for asylum should — as before — gain free access to the United States? Or do they just express their "moral outrage" and leave it there?
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* And — one more time — I've got to remind you of what George Orwell said about dying metaphors:

Dying metaphors. A newly invented metaphor assists thought by evoking a visual image, while on the other hand a metaphor which is technically "dead" (e.g. iron resolution) has in effect reverted to being an ordinary word and can generally be used without loss of vividness. But in between these two classes there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves. Examples are: Ring the changes on, take up the cudgel for, toe the line, ride roughshod over, stand shoulder to shoulder with, play into the hands of, no axe to grind, grist to the mill, fishing in troubled waters, on the order of the day, Achilles' heel, swan song, hotbed. Many of these are used without knowledge of their meaning (what is a "rift," for instance?), and incompatible metaphors are frequently mixed, a sure sign that the writer is not interested in what he is saying.