Dobbs: Big Media Hide Truth About Immigration

Demographers at the Brookings Institution and the Population Reference Bureau paint a troubling picture of the future of our democracy.*

By Lou Dobbs
CNN

NEW YORK (CNN) — The Bush administration and the leadership of the Democratic Party are preparing to take another legislative leap at imposing a massive illegal alien amnesty on American citizens.

And 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.

Too often, the language of the national media describes illegal immigration as “migration” and illegal aliens as “undocumented immigrants,” even though many of them have lots of documents, most of which are fraudulent or stolen. Some media outlets have taken to calling illegal aliens “entrants.” Whether such language is meant to engender sympathy or to intentionally blur the distinction between legal and illegal, the mainstream media are taking sides in this debate.

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.

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The term democracy which loosely translates to ‘mob rules’ does not appear in the Declaration of Independnce, the United States Constitution or the Bill of Rights. The Founding Fathers explicitly warned us, their progeny, not to embrace the kind of democracy we see today but at our own peril. — Editor

2007-04-25