April 25, 2007

Lou Dobbs on media immigration bias; David Bosco/FP downplays

Lou Dobbs offers "Big media hide truth about immigration". This site has hundreds of examples of that bias in the archives, so that won't come as a surprise to regular readers:

...the mainstream media are complicit in advancing this thinly veiled blanket amnesty. Instead of asking and answering important questions about why our immigration laws aren't being enforced and why we're permitting pervasive document fraud, the national media seem hell-bent on trying to obfuscate the issue, shamelessly playing with language, equating legal immigration with illegal immigration while obviously trying to preserve the illusion of objectivity...

...The Arizona Republic, for example, used "undocumented immigrant" more than 80 times in 36 separate stories in the past month alone; the term appeared as many as 12 times in one article on "migration," according to our Lexis-Nexis search. At the same time, "illegal alien" appeared a total of only nine times during that span, with seven of the references coming from readers' opinions, one from a quotation and one from an editorial...

Obviously, Dobbs could have gone on for dozens of pages, offering examples from the WaPo, the NYT, LAT, CBS, NBC, ABC, and on down the line.

Like a hack from Reason Magazine desperately trying to find any possible sort of anti-Dobbs hook, David Bosco of the Foreign Policy blog (blog.foreignpolicy.com/node/4543) takes him to task for not going on at great length:

And what is the one publication he indicts by name? The Arizona Republic. The specter of Dobbs, a powerful and bullying CNN host, lambasting regional newspapers as the out-of-touch "big media" is really too much.

One will note, of course, that he didn't answer Dobbs' main point, and I think we all know why.

Posted to Immigration2007a at April 25, 2007 12:59 PM