One of the big problems with recent coverage of immigration was the portrayal of the state of Arizona as a remarkably violent place due to the flood of unauthorized immigrants. It was a stew of misinformation, and one of the most prevalent claims was that Phoenix was The Kidnapping Capital of the Country (and No. 2 in the entire world).

That story always looked  a little shaky, as this ThinkProgress review pointed out (7/9/10). Now it looks like there could be more problems. A brief item in the New York Times today (3/4/11) reported that Phoenix's public safety manager was suspended

while an audit is being conducted to determine whether he inflated kidnapping statistics to win federal grant money, officials said on Thursday. The police reported more than 350 kidnappings in 2008 and said that almost all of them were linked to border violence, prompting some to label Phoenix the kidnapping capital of the United States. The actual number might have been closer to 250, officials said.

ABC News led the way on this story--you can still see Brian Ross' 2009 report, "Kidnapping Capital of the USA," here. Will he be doing an update?

The owner of the Washington Redskins football team, Dan Snyder, is suing the local City Paper for publishing an unflattering cover image of him--namely, a photo doctored to include devil horns. That image was accompanied by an article about Snyder's business practices.

Rob Capriccioso of Indian Country Today points out (2/1/11) that the suit alleges the cover art is "the type of imagery used historically, including in Nazi Germany, to dehumanize and vilify the Jewish people." And, well....

The claim comes as ironic to many observers since Native Americans have for over a decade been suing Snyder for his use of the Redskins name and trademark. The word redskins has historically been used derogatorily toward Indians, and is highly offensive.

Kudos to Richard Prince for reporting this in his Journal-isms column yesterday.

For more on racist mascots, see "Cheerleading for ‘Abusive’ Mascots: Critics of Native American sports symbols are sidelined" (Extra!, 7/10).

As we approach the Monday holiday, we're hearing a Pentagon lawyer suggest that Martin Luther King would support the war in Afghanistan. That makes it an ideal time to recall a 1995 column by FAIR founder Jeff Cohen and longtime associate Norman Solomon (Media Beat, 1/4/95). The full column appears below, and is archived here.

The Martin Luther King You Don't See on TV

by Jeff Cohen and Norman Solomon

It's become a TV ritual: Every year in mid-January, around the time of Martin Luther King's birthday, we get perfunctory network news reports about "the slain civil rights leader."

The remarkable thing about this annual review of King's life is that several years--his last years--are totally missing, as if flushed down a memory hole.

What TV viewers see is a closed loop of familiar file footage: King battling desegregation in Birmingham (1963); reciting his dream of racial harmony at the rally in Washington (1963); marching for voting rights in Selma, Alabama (1965); and finally, lying dead on the motel balcony in Memphis (1968).

An alert viewer might notice that the chronology jumps from 1965 to 1968. Yet King didn't take a sabbatical near the end of his life. In fact, he was speaking and organizing as diligently as ever.

Almost all of those speeches were filmed or taped. But they're not shown today on TV.

Why?

It's because national news media have never come to terms with what Martin Luther King, Jr., stood for during his final years.

In the early 1960s, when King focused his challenge on legalized racial discrimination in the South, most major media were his allies. Network TV and national publications graphically showed the police dogs and bullwhips and cattle prods used against Southern blacks who sought the right to vote or to eat at a public lunch counter.

But after passage of civil rights acts in 1964 and 1965, King began challenging the nation's fundamental priorities. He maintained that civil rights laws were empty without "human rights"--including economic rights. For people too poor to eat at a restaurant or afford a decent home, King said, anti-discrimination laws were hollow.

Noting that a majority of Americans below the poverty line were white, King developed a class perspective. He decried the huge income gaps between rich and poor, and called for "radical changes in the structure of our society" to redistribute wealth and power.

"True compassion," King declared, "is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring."

By 1967, King had also become the country's most prominent opponent of the Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of overall U.S. foreign policy, which he deemed militaristic. In his "Beyond Vietnam" speech delivered at New York's Riverside Church on April 4, 1967--a year to the day before he was murdered--King called the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today."

From Vietnam to South Africa to Latin America, King said, the U.S. was "on the wrong side of a world revolution." King questioned "our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America," and asked why the U.S. was suppressing revolutions "of the shirtless and barefoot people" in the Third World, instead of supporting them.

In foreign policy, King also offered an economic critique, complaining about "capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries."

You haven't heard the "Beyond Vietnam" speech on network news retrospectives, but national media heard it loud and clear back in 1967--and loudly denounced it. Life magazine called it "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi." The Washington Post patronized that "King has diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people."

In his last months, King was organizing the most militant project of his life: the Poor People's Campaign. He crisscrossed the country to assemble "a multiracial army of the poor" that would descend on Washington--engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience at the Capitol, if need be--until Congress enacted a poor people's bill of rights. Reader's Digest warned of an "insurrection."

King's economic bill of rights called for massive government jobs programs to rebuild America's cities. He saw a crying need to confront a Congress that had demonstrated its "hostility to the poor"--appropriating "military funds with alacrity and generosity," but providing "poverty funds with miserliness."

How familiar that sounds today, more than a quarter-century after King's efforts on behalf of the poor people's mobilization were cut short by an assassin's bullet.

As 1995 gets underway, in this nation of immense wealth, the White House and Congress continue to accept the perpetuation of poverty. And so do most mass media. Perhaps it's no surprise that they tell us little about the last years of Martin Luther King's life.

The Scott sisters (Gladys and Jamie) were serving double life sentences in a Mississippi state prison over the supposed role they played in an armed robbery that amounted to $11. At the end of 2010 their sentences were suspended by Governor Haley Barbour, provided that Jamie receive a kidney donation from her sister.

The sisters' ordeal, as columnist Richard Prince wrote back in November, came to national attention thanks largely to a November 2008 piece in the Black Commentator by Nancy Lockhart, which then spread throughout black-oriented blogs and talk radio, as well as the alternative media (Prince cites a piece by James Ridgeway of  Mother Jones).

The story then began to get national attention, mostly thanks to African-American columnists like Bob Herbert and Leonard Pitts, and NPR's Michel Martin of Tell Me More. Prince joined us on CounterSpin (12/3/10) to tell the story behind this story.

Bob Herbert was back on the story on December 31, writing a strong column that ended: "The Scott sisters may go free, but they will never receive justice." That they're free at all is a testament to activism and the role of the independent media. And it should serve as a reminder that diversity inside the mainstream media certainly mattered; as Janine Jackson put it during that CounterSpin interview with Prince:

But it seems reasonable to consider whether this case would have even the so-called "big" media presence that it's gained at this point, if it weren't for Bob Herbert at the New York Times, who's written about it; Leonard Pitts, syndicated columnist; Michel Martin at NPR. It has been not entirely, but it's had a lot to do with highly placed black journalists that the story has kind of bubbled up.

On Friday, Fox News anchor Trace Gallagher took a study that says there are 100,000 fewer Hispanics in Arizona than there were before the debate over the state's disputed anti-immigrant law, and reported it as 100,000 fewer "illegals."

By conflating Hispanics with "illegals," Gallagher inadvertently illustrates the case made by opponents of the law.

I clicked on the Washington Post website on Sunday and saw this:

We Overreact to Prejudice Instead of Airing It Out

By Kathleen Parker

Only someone who's pondered Barack Obama's "fullbloodedness" and Elena Kagan's distance from "mainstream" America (hint: She's Jewish, and from New York!) can do this. Parker also wrote a memorable column about Barack Obama being too "girly," then explained in a follow-up that, unlike African-Americans, she has the "luxury of seeing people without the lens of race."

Kathleen Parker is indeed an expert in "airing out" prejudice.

Monday's front-page New York Times piece, "'Culture of Poverty,' Long an Academic Slur, Makes a Comeback," is about how it's okay again for scholars to talk about the "culture of poverty" and to study "cultural" aspects of the subject.

It's a trend reporter Patricia Cohen suggests vindicates Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who popularized the term in the mid-'60s when he infamously wrote that much of black America was caught up in a "tangle of pathology" resulting from "the weakness of the [black] family structure," which he called "the principal source of most of the aberrant, inadequate or antisocial behavior that did not establish, but now serves to perpetuate, the cycle of poverty and deprivation."

But Cohen cites no one defending the term "culture of poverty," though the headline suggests as much. And some of the studies cited as being part of a vindication of "cultural" studies of poverty are things that few sociologists--who, of course, routinely study "culture" as a matter of course--would ever have objected to. Exactly who, for instance, would object to a study of the effects of community violence on the ability of children to learn?

And, as Cohen explains, at least two of the studies cited in her report (including one that looks at what makes parents with kids in daycare more likely to develop networks of support) don't track with income or ethnicity, making them examples more suitable for inclusion in an article other than the one she wrote.

One of Cohen's problems seems to be in her narrow definition of  "culture," which buys into the the right-wing view that culture, in this context, denotes such issues as marriage, "illegitimacy" and so on. In other words, largely Moynihan's view of things.

Unless I am imagining things, scholars have been studying for decades how cultural factors such as educational and economic opportunity, violence and even nutrition affect poverty and poor communities.

In the end, Cohen's suggestion that Moynihan's racist views are back in academic vogue amount to little more than Princeton sociologist Douglas Massey saying Moynihan has been  "maligned" (without explaining how), a gratuitous mention of comedian Bill Cosby's more Moynihanian sociological conjectures, and the Times' devout wish to see the great man vindicated.

Isabel Macdonald, a former FAIR staff member, published an article in the Nation (10/7/10) revealing that undocumented workers had been landscaping Lou Dobbs' Florida home and looking after his daughter's show horses.  As a hardline commentator on the issue of "illegal immigrant workers," one would think Dobbs would be a little embarrassed about this discovery.

When Dobbs and Macdonald appeared on MSNBC's Last Word (10/7/10) yesterday to debate the issue, Macdonald pointed out that "Lou Dobbs, who has made himself an emblem of this get-tough approach to immigration...had been exploiting undocumented labor."

Dobbs attempted to sidestep the issue by claiming that he had never "directly or indirectly hired an undocumented worker." To which host Lawrence O'Donnell replied, "Someone hired by your landscaping contractor had an undocumented worker on your property . That, Lou, is indirect."

Dobbs, though, had his own definition of "indirectly": "intentionally hiring a contractor...for the specific purpose of hiring an illegal immigrant."

Dobbs, Macdonald said, has criticized others in the past for not verifying contract workers: "[In] 2007, you called employers ridiculous for insisting that they should not have to be held accountable for their contractors' employees."

In his debate with Macdonald, however, Dobbs claimed that not only was he not obligated to find out the immigration status of those who were working for him, he was legally prevented from doing so: "The reality is this: There is a law against you or me inquiring about a legal status for a person in this country.... That's a violation of their rights."

Dobbs is scheduled to speak at a Tea Party conference this weekend.

Martin Peretz, owner/editor of the New Republic, has come under fire recently for his anti-Muslim comments--leading to protests at Harvard, where Peretz is scheduled to be honored with an endowed chair in social studies named for him.

Peretz's bigotry has been well-known for years--and is not confined to Muslims or Arabs, though those may be the most frequent targets of his prejudice. Here's a remark made by Peretz at a forum on black/Jewish relations in 1994 (New York Newsday, 3/28/94; Washington Post, 3/28/94; cited in Extra!, 3-4/96):

So many people in the black population are afflicted by deficiencies, and I mean cultural deficiencies, which Jews, for example, didn't.... I would guess that in the ghetto a lot of mothers don't appreciate the importance of schooling.

UPDATE: Sourcing clarified; one missing word restored.

UPDATE 2: See "Double Your Standard: Repudiation, Forgiveness and Martin Peretz" (Extra!, 9-10/94) by Alexander Cockburn for reactions and non-reactions to Peretz's comments.

In the New York Times today (9/20/10), Michael Shear writes:

But as the first full week of the 2010 general election season opens across the country on Monday, Washington is scheduled once again to debate immigration and gay men, lesbians and bisexuals in the military, two deeply divisive social issues that threaten to polarize the conversation on the campaign trail.

Repealing "Don't Ask Don't Tell" is widely supported by the public. Public opinion on immigration policy is somewhat more complex; this story is referring to the legislation known as the DREAM Act, which would provide a path to citizenship for students who have been here five years and are either attending college or have served in the military. One survey found 70 percent support for the proposal.

It would be much more helpful if reporters explained that when they talk about "divisive social issues" that will "polarize" the election campaign season, they mean that a handful of Republican politicians will very loudly endorse the views of a shrinking segment of the public.

Daniel Hernandez wrote an article for Extra! last year (6/09) about the tendency of U.S. corporate media to treat Mexican violence as a phenomenon that threatens to "spill over" into the U.S.--as in New York Times headlines like "Drug Cartel Violence Spills Over From Mexico, Alarming U.S." (3/23/09) and "Wave of Drug Violence Is Creeping Into Arizona From Mexico, Officials Say" (2/24/09). Hernandez's article, "Does Violence 'Spill Over' or Come Home to Roost?," questioned this framing of the story:

It is a treatment of Mexico's crisis as something foreign, unknown and dangerous, as opposed to a threat affecting an intimately close neighbor--and, in many respects, a crisis that is at least partly a product of American policies.

A new report from Mayors Against Illegal Guns (9/10)  underscores how this "spill over" metaphor distorts reality:

In recent years, the escalating drug cartel violence in Mexico has claimed tens of thousands of lives, fueled in part by thousands of guns illegally trafficked from the United States. In fact, 90 percent of guns recovered and traced from Mexican crime scenes originated from gun dealers in the United States.

Most of the guns come from Texas, California and Arizona, the report finds--with Texas, Arizona and New Mexico supplying disproportionate numbers in comparison to their populations.

An imaginary crime wave supposedly caused by unauthorized immigration from Mexico has been frequently offered by pundits as a rationalization for Arizona's draconian anti-immigrant law (Extra!, 7/10). It would be more helpful for media observers to call attention to the actual assistance U.S. gun dealers are providing to violent criminals on the other side of the border.

A recent FAIR study (Extra!, 8/10) looked at politically themed books reviewed by the New York Times Book Review and the C-SPAN show After Words and concluded that both outlets heavily favored white male authors and reviewers. The Times came off particularly badly in the study, which revealed 95 percent of the U.S. authors reviewed, and 96 percent of the reviewers, were white.

As far as gender was concerned, women--who obviously make up roughly 50 percent of the population--accounted for just 13 percent of the authors and 12 percent of the critics.

Today, Slate weighed in on the New York Times Book Review's biases. Picking up on a controversy sparked by author Jodi Picoult's charges of gender bias at the review, Slate published a study showing that 62 percent of the the fiction book's reviewed by the section were written by men, and the subset that were also reviewed in the daily paper were 71 percent male-authored.

Are New York Times book reviews a white male ghetto in an otherwise more diverse newspaper? Well, no. On gender, numerous byline studies have shown the paper heavily favoring male reporters, particularly on the front page. One such study conducted for FAIR (Extra!, 8/04) found that 88 percent of the Times front-page articles were written by men.

Now a new study has emerged showing that the Times runs more than six times as many obituaries on men as they do on women. According to the website NYTPicker (8/29/10), so far in 2010, 85 percent of the paper's obituaries have been about men, with men's obits out pacing women's 606 to 92.

So the Times' male bias prevails, even in death.

In the coverage of Hurricane Katrina's fifth anniversary, you'll find several obligatory mentions in the corporate media of the still-decimated Lower Ninth Ward, but you'd be hard pressed to find anything as direct or damning as what you find in independent media coverage--for example, this piece on Women's eNews (8/29/10) by Kimberly Seals Allers, who recently attended a conference in New Orleans on health disparities in communities of color:

When a few of the local community leaders came to address us, what they had to say about the Lower Ninth Ward was appalling but not surprising. They said that of the $90 million that the Federal Emergency Management Agency allocated to rebuilding the city, the Lower Ninth Ward has not received any money. Nobody has been told a definitive answer as to why.

They said the Lower Ninth Ward only has one working school for kindergarten through 12th grade. The school has 750 students and a 450-student-long waiting list. There are no hospitals in the area and God help you if you need emergency care and have to travel across the bridge and across town to get it. Many displaced residents, they added, would love to return to the area, but they can't because there are no schools and no real health care options for the elderly.

The local community leaders expressed their outrage that tour companies bring busloads of people through the Lower Ninth Ward everyday to gawk at their despair, yet never share any of their profits or stop to support local businesses.

The lesson of Shirley Sherrod's disgraceful treatment by right-wing and not-so-right-wing media (followed by her equally squalid dismissal by an administration that took that media at face value) boils down to a single question: When will journalists see Andrew Breitbart as the serial promoter of journalistic frauds that he is, rather than as a legitimate source for story ideas?

FAIR readers will remember Breitbart's dissemination of videos that purported to show ACORN employees advising a "prostitute" and her "pimp" -- conservative activists Hannah Giles and James O'Keefe--on how to avoid paying taxes. The videos have since been heavily debunked. As FAIR has noted before (Action Alert, 3/11/10), O'Keefe didn't "pose" as a pimp--he didn't wear his ridiculous  "pimp" outfit inside ACORN offices, and in almost every case pretended to be a concerned boyfriend trying to get his girlfriend away from an abusive pimp. He also did not receive advice on how to "cheat" on his taxes. Additionally,  ACORN has been cleared of wrongdoing by three separate independent investigations.

Breitbart's latest fraud--posting a selectively edited video in which Sherrod appears to make some overtly racist statements to a local NAACP chapter--led to the forced resignation of the USDA employee.

That video went viral in the right-wing media and beyond, as accusations of Sherrod's racism were tossed about, along with the larger implication that the Obama administration harbored racists. As Sherrod tells it, she soon received three separate calls telling her the White House was asking for her resignation, with one official telling her she would be on Glenn Beck that night.

The Sherrod story didn’t actually make it on Beck that night, but it was all over Fox News. Bill O'Reilly (7/19/10) called Sherrod's comments "unacceptable" and called for her to "resign immediately."  Sean Hannity (7/19/10) called the comments "racist" and praised Breitbart for exposing them.

The next day, as details of Sherrod's entire speech emerged, it became clear she was describing her experience of struggling with and surmounting bias. Her point was an anti-racist one. Even the white farmer who was allegedly wronged by Sherrod appeared on CNN (7/20/10), along with his wife, to defend her.

Predictably, many right-wing media personalities stood by Breitbart even as the truth was being revealed. Rush Limbaugh (7/20/10) said Breitbart did "great work getting this video of Ms. Sherrod at the U.S. Department of Agriculture and her supposed racism."  Hannity (7/20/10) invited Breitbart on his show to defend himself.  Meanwhile, O'Reilly (7/20/10) stood by his demand for Sherrod's resignation, and even chastised the rest of the media for not reporting on Breitbart's heavily edited video--adding it to a long list of invented right-wing controversies he believes have been ignored by the mainstream media, including the aforementioned ACORN hoax, as well as the  New Black Panther voter intimidation "scandal" and the Van Jones resignation--both of which were wildly overblown (Counterspin, 7/16/10; Extra!, 11/09), but were, contrary to O'Reilly's protestations, picked up by more centrist media after amplification in the right-wing echo chamber.

The same is true of the Sherrod resignation, which some outlets continued to frame as a he said/she said controversy even after the truth began to emerge--outlets such as AP (7/20/10), which also took the opportunity to laud Breitbart's BigGovernment.com as the site that "gained fame after releasing video of workers for the community organizing group ACORN counseling actors posing as a pimp and prostitute."

In the Washington Post (7/21/10), Karen Tumulty and Krissah Thompson were still lending credence to Breitbart's video even after the entire speech was released, reporting on the episode as a controversy between Sherrod and "her critics" as well as one that reinforces the right-wing narrative "that the administration of the first African-American to occupy the White House practices its own brand of racism."

It isn't surprising that right-wing media continue to exalt Breitbart, but when will the rest of the corporate media learn that he can't be trusted?

As France's lower house of parliament approved a ban on wearing full-face Islamic veils such as the burqa or niqab, many U.S. news outlets left out a key voice in their reports: the Muslim women in France who are actually affected by the ban.

Several major outlets, including the New York Times (7/14/10), Washington Post (7/14/10) and the Los Angeles Times (7/14/10), have managed to cover the story without seeking commentary from a single Muslim woman. Out of 11 named sources used by these newspapers in their July 14 reports, only two were Muslim--both men, one a rector and one leader of a government council, each of whom discourage women from wearing the burqa.

Furthermore, 10 out of the 11 sources on the issue came from French government officials, most of whom unsurprisingly (since the ban passed 335 to 1) echoed the sentiment of the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe that these veils "could be a threat to women's dignity and freedom" (Chicago Tribune, 6/24/10). While the New York Times (7/14/10) quoted Daniel Garrigue, the one parliament member who opposed the ban, and another anti-ban official,  it followed up with five rebuttals, along with a poll that showed French voters as a whole--most of whom are little affected by the law--support the ban.

On CNN (7/13/10), Republican strategist Mary Matalin and journalist Roland Martin discussed the ban with no debate:

MATALIN: You know what, the vote was 336 to 1 [sic] in the lower house of the parliament, and it's a good vote. The assimilation there of Muslims, who are the largest percentage in European countries are in France. Assimilation is tough when you have a full-face burqa. And it's also oppressive to women. No woman chooses to wear that full-face burqa. So I say to France, tres bien, good vote.

MARTIN: And I will say this, I mean, you do have to understand the cultural issues there. I think what this really says though is about freedom for women, in terms of French saying, look, they perceive that as being oppressive to women. And then if you want to operate in this country, this is how we are going to operate here. And so I understand that.

But I do think we have to be careful to recognize that there are cultural things that happen, more different cultures we also have to respect.

MATALIN: That is--I completely agree with that. The veil is a beautiful thing. All of my Muslim girlfriends say it's great. It's not only respectful and mindful of their religion, it's great for bad hair days. So we get that. But the full-face burqa, nyet.

MARTIN: Right, absolutely.

MATALIN: Tres bien, Francois.

But despite Matalin’s assertion, not everyone agrees that the burqa is exclusively a tool of repression, or that banning the burqa is the best way to promote women’s equality--and many of the dissenters happen to be Muslim women. USA Today and NBC News both interviewed Kenza Drider, who was born and raised in France and has worn the burqa for 11 years, who said (NBC Nightly News, 7/7/10): "I'm a feminist. I wear this by choice, and I submit to no man, only God." The Huffington Post (7/13/10) quoted an Islamic scholar, Abdelmotie Bayoumi, who has written books that include modern testimonies about the full-face veil: "A Muslim woman wears the niqab not because of religious duty, but as a personal freedom." Sahar (Nuseiba.wordpress.com, 7/4/10), a Muslim blogger, said that though she isn't personally fond of the burqa, she believes that "a woman's right to choose how to express her religion... or her culture as she sees fit is fundamental to her dignity and should be protected."

In covering a law targeting Muslim women, it is essential to include such perspectives, instead of simply packing the views of powerful leaders and Western ideology into a report.