Yesterday, the Trump administration missed a court-mandated deadline to reunite migrant children under the age of 5 with their families. Despite the administration’s failure to reunite some of the most vulnerable migrant children, Fox News barely paid attention to the story. Instead, Fox spent significantly more time discussing FBI agent Peter Strzok and former FBI attorney Lisa Page, who have been subpoenaed to appear before congressional committees this week.  

According to a court filing early yesterday, the federal government had reunited “only four — out of 102 — migrant children under 5 years old” who were separated from their families due to President Donald Trump’s “zero tolerance” immigration policy. The government said it was in the process of rejoining about half of the children and provided a myriad of reasons the others couldn’t be reunited at this time, including that some of their parents have been deported or already released into the United States.

On the day of the deadline, Fox News devoted just 14 minutes to discussing the Trump administration’s failure to meet the initial court-mandated deadline. In comparison, the network spent triple that amount of time discussing Strzok and Page, who were asked to testify on Capitol Hill this week. Fox has a history of fixating on the two FBI officials and promoting conspiracy theories involving them. 

Melissa Joskow / Media Matters

In contrast to Fox’s minimal coverage of the missed family reunification deadline, CNN and MSNBC spent significantly more time on the administration’s failure to reunite the children with their families. CNN devoted over two hours to the topic while MSNBC covered it for around an hour and a half.

Melissa Joskow / Media Matters

Since Trump’s family separation policy is extraordinarily unpopular, it’s no surprise that Fox would devote just scant attention to the administration’s inability to correct this crisis of its own making.   

Methodology: Media Matters searched media monitoring service SnapStream for the words “deadline,” “family,” “parents,” “kids,” and variations of the words “immigration,” “reunification” and “reunite, as well as “Lisa,” “Page,” “Strzok,” “lover,” and variants of “testify.”