News coverage of Immigration and Customs Enforcement has shifted sharply over the last decade largely because President Donald Trump is now in office, even though many of the enforcement procedures being criticized today have been standard practice for years, journalist Matt Taibbi told Newsmax on Saturday.
"I think the main difference is that Donald Trump is president," Taibbi, editor-in-chief of Racket News, said in an interview with Newsmax's "America Right Now."
"So many of the practices that are now here being described as unprecedented are things that we knew were common 10 or 15 years ago," he said.
Taibbi said ICE enforcement actions such as street detentions and immigration-status checks long predate the current administration, he added.
"Stopping cars to check people’s immigration status, that was going on in Los Angeles, that was going on in Georgia," he said.
Taibbi also pointed to past deportation levels, saying there were "record numbers of people being deported right at a time when it was popular."
Asked why public perception appears different now, Taibbi said the current crackdown stands out more for visibility and scale than for novelty.
He said the program may feel different because "the agents are masked and there are more of them on the streets, so they’re more visible."
However, Taibbi said, "these are exactly the same policies that have been in place in the United States for 20 years."
Meanwhile, he noted that some newsrooms have become predictable in their coverage of Trump-era policies.
"A lot of news agencies are really reflexively sort of anti-Trump," he said. "Any policy that he’s going to undertake is going to get criticism, whether or not they previously supported that policy or not."
Taibbi added that the rise of independent outlets reflects a deeper crisis of confidence in legacy media.
"The media is a trust business," Taibbi said. "When you make a lot of mistakes or when the audience can tell ahead of time what you’re going to say about anything, they will tune you out."
Audiences are also "tired of the politicized content" and "of the facts turning out to be wrong," which he said has pushed more viewers toward independent journalists.
Independent outlets are not uniformly reliable, Taibbi stressed, but noted that they are "at least independent and less predictable."
Taibbi said traditional media’s ability to dominate public narratives peaked in 2020.
"I think the summer of 2020 was the high point of the conventional kind of legacy media’s ability to completely dominate the discourse around the country," he said, adding that similar efforts to shape national narratives are "not really getting the same traction as it did previously."
He described social media as a powerful accelerant for polarization because provocative takes outperform more measured reporting.
Taibbi’s advice for journalists, he said, is to return to basic credibility standards.
"When you make mistakes, you have to admit them," he said. "You have to try to consider all the angles to the story."
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