How Media Framing Shapes Public Opinion: A Case Study in the California ICE Raids
When 200 people were arrested during ICE raids at Glass House Farms in Southern California, the story that emerged wasn't just about immigration enforcement—it was about how fundamentally different editorial approaches can create entirely different realities for news consumers.
I've been tracking how The Center Square covered these July 10-11 raids compared to legacy outlets like The New York Times, Associated Press, ABC News, and local television affiliates.
This post examines the work published immediately following that event. What makes this comparison particularly revealing is that all of these stories were written within the same 24-hour period, and each news organization had comparable access to the same information.
The differences aren't just striking—they're illuminating about the state of American journalism today.
The Facts vs. The Narrative
Let's start with what actually happened. Federal agents conducted immigration raids at Glass House Farms, a licensed marijuana cultivation facility in Camarillo and Carpinteria. Two hundred arrests were made.
Ten juveniles were found working at the facility—eight of them unaccompanied minors.
During protests that followed the raids, one protester appeared to fire a pistol at federal agents. Tear gas was deployed to disperse crowds. One fatality –– Jaime Alanis, an illegal laborer from Mexico who had been in the country for 10 years, and whose family told Al Jazeera that he had called while he was hiding before he later fell 30 feet to his death from a greenhouse roof during the raid –– was reported.
Those are the facts. But depending on which outlet you read, you'd get wildly different impressions of who the good guys and bad guys were in this story—and you might not even learn some of the most important details at all.
The Center Square's Approach: Facts First
Our coverage led with the numbers: 200 arrests, the shooting incident, and the child labor allegations. We sourced our reporting directly from DOJ, DHS, ICE, and CBP officials. We described federal officers as conducting lawful operations while facing violent resistance.
Most importantly, we reported details that other outlets either buried or ignored entirely. We explicitly stated that 10 juveniles were found working at the facility—eight of them unaccompanied minors. As U.S. Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott told us: "10 juveniles were found at this marijuana facility — all illegal aliens, eight of them unaccompanied."
We were also the only outlet to plainly identify Glass House Farms as a licensed marijuana-growing facility. While other outlets referred generically to "farms" or "fields," we called it what it was: a marijuana farm where children were being exploited for labor.
And we included critical context that no other outlet provided—quotes from DHS officials suggesting possible trafficking and forced labor: "At the California marijuana facilities, ICE and CBP law enforcement rescued at least 10 migrant children from what looks like exploitation, forced child labor, and potentially human trafficking or smuggling."
When protesters disrupted the raids, we called them what they were based on their actions—rioters and agitators who damaged vehicles and forced agents to dodge bullets while trying to rescue children from illegal work conditions.
We included counterpoints, including Governor Gavin Newsom's criticism of the raids, but we juxtaposed it with the DHS rebuttal that cut to the heart of the matter: "Why are there children working at a marijuana facility, Gavin?"
The Sin of Omission: How Bias Shapes What Gets Reported
The mainstream outlets took a completely different approach—and committed journalism's cardinal sin in the process. The New York Times led with helicopter footage and trauma narratives. They framed federal action as overreach and minimized the criminal enforcement aspect while emphasizing community reaction. But here's what they deliberately omitted: they never mentioned that this was a marijuana cultivation facility, never gave a specific count of the minors discovered, and never mentioned that eight of them were unaccompanied.
These weren't accidental oversights. These were editorial choices driven by newsroom bias—the kind of institutional thinking that decides certain facts don't serve the preferred narrative.
ABC News went even further, using phrases like "masked federal agents" and "kids running from tear gas" to dominate their news narrative. They prominently featured political commentary from Governor Newsom while downplaying the legal justification for the raids. Like the Times, they avoided mentioning marijuana cultivation entirely and gave no details about the ages or status of the child laborers. The bias here is clear: frame law enforcement as the aggressors, omit facts that might justify their actions.
The Associated Press attempted neutrality but leaned heavily into human-interest angles, providing less detail on the legal basis for arrests and relying on crowd imagery to tell their story. But that crowd imagery focused on the protestors’ points of view. AP made only passing mentions of minors in the context of tear gas exposure—not as potential trafficking victims being rescued from exploitation. Even in their attempt at objectivity, their bias toward emotional storytelling led them to omit the most significant legal and humanitarian aspects of the story.
Local television affiliates focused on raw video and community reactions, often showing protester injuries without analyzing what caused the confrontations. They used loaded descriptors like "clash," "chaos," and "standoff" while omitting the marijuana cultivation context and the specific number of children found working at the facility. Their bias toward dramatic visuals caused them to ignore the substance of why law enforcement was there in the first place.
None of these outlets—not one—mentioned the possibility of human trafficking or presented the law enforcement perspective that agents were rescuing exploited children from forced labor conditions during this reporting period. This isn't incompetence. It's bias manifesting as systematic omission.
The Language of Bias
The differences become even clearer when you examine the specific language choices each outlet made. Consider the following:
The Center Square: "Rioters damaged vehicles… agents dodging bullets to save children" Implication: Law enforcement heroism under threat
New York Times: "Kids running from tear gas, crying…" Implication: Victimhood and trauma
ABC News: "Masked agents clashed with protestors" Implication: Secretive, aggressive government actors
Associated Press: "Canisters that sprayed what looked like smoke" Implication: Uncertainty, soft-pedaled attribution
Local television: "Federal agents used force at farms…" Implication: Forceful action of ambiguous legality
These aren't accidental word choices. They're editorial decisions that shape how readers understand events.
And it specifically underscores the need for facts in flashpoint moments. Remember when CNN reported that the riots in Kenosha, Wis., in 2020 were “mostly peaceful protests”?
Yeah, we haven’t evolved much as an industry since then. The mainstream media – especially television – continues to selectively report through characterizations and editorial perspectives while American news consumers are watching the events unfold in real time.
What This Means for News Consumers
The practical impact of these different approaches can't be overstated. Someone who only reads The New York Times or watches ABC News would come away believing federal agents conducted an unnecessarily aggressive raid that traumatized children and sparked justified community outrage. They would have no idea that 10 children were found working at a marijuana facility, that eight of them were unaccompanied minors, or that federal officials suspected human trafficking and forced labor.
This isn't just incomplete reporting—it's deliberately incomplete reporting. The omission of these facts serves a narrative purpose: it deliberately makes law enforcement look bad and protesters appear sympathetic. But that framing leaves readers fundamentally misinformed about what occurred and the core facts within the news.
Someone who reads The Center Square would understand that federal agents were conducting lawful immigration enforcement at a licensed marijuana cultivation facility, discovered child labor violations involving unaccompanied minors, suspected human trafficking, and had to defend themselves against violent protesters who rallied quickly to the raid site while these agents were trying to rescue children from exploitation.
Both audiences would be consuming information from the same event, but they'd have completely different understandings of what happened. More importantly, mainstream media consumers would be missing the most significant aspects of the story entirely—not because the information wasn't available, but because their news sources chose not to include it.
The Trust Dividend: Why Facts-Only Reporting Matters
This is exactly why The Center Square's approach matters so much. We're not trying to manufacture emotional responses or advance political narratives. We're trying to give readers the information they need to understand what's actually happening—all of it, not just the parts that fit a predetermined story.
When we report that agents were "dodging bullets to save children," that's not editorial commentary—that's what the evidence shows happened. When we describe the people who fired on federal agents as "rioters," we're using accurate terminology for people who engaged in violent criminal behavior. When we specify that 10 juveniles were found and eight were unaccompanied, we're providing facts that are essential to understanding the scope and nature of the operation.
Legacy outlets have chosen a different path. They've decided that generating emotional engagement and reinforcing their readers' existing beliefs is more important than providing complete, factual reporting. They're not wrong that this approach can build audience loyalty—but they're sacrificing credibility and, more importantly, their readers' ability to make informed decisions. We shouldn’t, as an industry, be actively attempting to recruit an audience by giving it news the way they would like to see or read it. That’s disingenuous and deceptive.
The sin of omission isn't just poor journalism—it's a betrayal of the public trust. When newsrooms allow their biases to determine not just how they tell a story, but which facts they include in the first place, they're no longer serving their readers. They're serving an agenda.
Building a Different Kind of Media
The Center Square's coverage of these raids represents everything we're trying to build: fact-first reporting that respects readers' intelligence and gives them the information they need to form their own opinions.
Our newsroom operates on a simple mantra: Accuracy + Velocity + Frequency. We focus on getting the story right, moving it quickly, and updating news frequently while it remains relevant to news consumers. This commitment to frequency also includes a willingness to stay with a story beyond the initial headlines. You can see this in our ongoing coverage of the damage from Hurricane Helene in western North Carolina and the fires that tore through the Palisades in southern California—we don't just report the breaking news and move on.
We're not telling people how to feel about immigration enforcement or child labor violations. We're telling them what happened, who was involved, and what the evidence shows. We're letting the facts speak for themselves.
This approach builds a different kind of trust with readers—one based on reliability rather than emotional validation. It's the kind of journalism that helps people make informed decisions about the issues that matter most to their communities.
In a media landscape increasingly dominated by narrative-driven reporting, The Center Square offers something different: the radical idea that facts matter more than feelings, and that good journalism serves readers by informing them rather than inflaming them.
That's not just our editorial philosophy—it's our promise to you.
Chris Krug is publisher of The Center Square, a national news organization focused on federal, state and local government accountability. Subscribe to receive updates on how we're changing the news landscape.