Was all that talk about the migrant caravan slowly walking across Mexico, and the “invasion” it potentially represented, just a manufactured topic for President Trump and Fox News?
Over the final two weeks of the midterm elections, according to closed-captioning data compiled by the Internet Archive, Fox News and Fox Business Channel each mentioned the word caravan in an average of a little over 3 percent of 15-second segments over the course of a day.
In other words, the caravan was mentioned an average of almost eight times an hour.
Fox News mentioned the caravan more than 80 times on Monday.
On Tuesday, election day, it was mentioned more than 40.
On Wednesday and Thursday, following the election, the subject dropped considerably.
On CNN and MSNBC, the mentions were more modest, but not nonexistent.
The caravan still exists.
Having reached Mexico City — still hundreds of miles from the U.S. border — many caravan participants paused for several days, but the procession started again Friday morning.
More pressing news didn’t curtail Fox News and Fox Business from consistently talking about the migrants every day before the election.
Even in late October, after the arrest of a suspect in a series of attempted mail bombings and the mass shooting at a synagogue in Pittsburgh which prompted CNN and MSNBC to taper off discussion of the caravan, the Fox networks didn’t.
The caravan was framed by Trump specifically as a campaign issue in multiple speeches.
This is yet more proof that the administration and Fox News share a common political message.