George Will, defending Arizona's draconian new immigration law, concludes his column (Washington Post, 4/28/10) with this today:

Arizonans should not be judged disdainfully and from a distance by people whose closest contacts with Hispanics are with fine men and women who trim their lawns and put plates in front of them at restaurants, not with illegal immigrants passing through their back yards at 3 a.m.

There are 47 million Latinos in the United States.  Will's assumption that the only ones known to the readers he's addressing are likely to be waiting tables or mowing lawns is quite bizarre--and a testament to how homogeneous his world must be.

Equally strange is the contrast he draws between the "fine" individuals his readers know and the presumably more sinister types found in Arizona backyards.  Arizona is not the only state with many Latino residents, nor with numerous unauthorized immigrants. At the beginning of his column, Will mocks House Speaker Nancy Pelosi for representing San Francisco, but California has more undocumented workers per capita and eight times as many in total; shouldn't he stop judging her disdainfully from a distance?

The Houston Chronicle's Susan Carroll (6/30/09) reports that Fox News celebrity journalist Geraldo Rivera "was touched" by the televised statement of a daughter mourning her law enforcement father who "was killed last week by a suspected illegal immigrant," but also stepped up to speak to the truth larger than divisive media coverage of the matter:

"We all deplore violent crime, but what has happened is that with these anecdotal tragedies, we have demonized an entire race of people in this country," Rivera said. "Immigrant and nonimmigrant alike. Citizen and noncitizen alike."...

Rivera...said the tone of the immigration debate has had serious consequences for Hispanics.

"We have created a slanderous condition and environment in our country, where the 46 million of us who have Latino roots now feel beleaguered, now feel besieged, now feel as if we are 'the other,'" he said.

Now, Rivera does regularly come down on the right side of this issue--albeit often in a typically bombastic cable news kind of way--but it still really speaks to the depths of Fox that this man is the network's voice of journalistic conscience. But then I suppose good sense that actually makes the corporate news should be welcome from any quarter: "Rivera called for President Barack Obama to end work site enforcement raids. He also said the Obama administration should better define guidelines for the federal government's 287(g) program, which deputizes local law enforcement to act as immigration agents."

Read more on the "slanderous condition" of immigration coverage in the featured content of a recent issue of FAIR's magazine Extra!: "Media Patrol the Border" (6/09).

Steven T. Jones and Sarah Phelan are reporting (San Francisco Bay Guardian online, 6/19/09) on San Francisco Chronicle immigration reporter Jaxon Van Derbeken's acceptance of "an award and cash prize (he refuses to say how much) from the Center for Immigration Studies--which a Southern Poverty Law Center report in February 2009 criticized for its overtly racist roots and extreme anti-immigrant agenda":

Van Derbeken and Ken Conner, the Chron's assistant managing editor for news (whom the reporter consulted before accepting the award), told the Guardian that they see nothing wrong with accepting the award and they don't see it as validating the views of a group that has been desperately seeking mainstream credibility with which to push its anti-immigrant agenda.

Somewhat confusingly, Van Derbeken claims of his smiling acceptance at the public ceremony, "No one should mistake their decision to endorse my work for my endorsement of theirs." But the group's appreciation for his work does make sense, considering that the stories they specifically laud "have been roundly criticized by immigrant rights groups as inflaming anti-immigrant sentiments and allowing policies that punish the innocent and divide families."

While "Conner both cited the fact that past recipients of the award included the Washington Post and Dallas Morning News," the Bay Guardian writers note that

that's true, but over the last six years since immigration has become such a hot button issue, the awards have gone mostly to right-wing publications and scary nativists. Three of the last six awards have gone to writers for the Washington Times, a right-wing newspaper created by Rev. Sun Myung Moon.

And, in case you had any more doubts about what's going on here: "The ultra-conservative National Review and anti-immigrant television commentator Lou Dobbs also [are] among the recent recipients." See the cover feature of the current issue of FAIR's magazine Extra: "Media Patrol the Border" (6/09).

A posting on Timothy Karr's Media Citizen blog (6/17/09) contrasts Crooks & Liars' collection of cable news pundits like Lou Dobbs and Bill O'Reilly likening the anti-immigrant Minutemen to a giant, friendly "neighborhood watch" organization with the "chilling double-murder" Minutemen leader Shawna Forde is accused of--describing "the 911 recording of the mother as she witnessed the execution of her 9-year-old daughter and husband. But what's even more infuriating is the way many prominent right-wing media pundits have made this group the darlings of 21st century patriotism":

Frank Rich's most recent New York Times column explains how crimes of this sort are part of a bigger problem egged on by right-wing media:

This homicide-saturated vituperation is endemic among mini-Limbaughs. Glenn Beck has dipped into O'Reilly's Holocaust analogies to liken Obama's policy on stem-cell research to the eugenics that led to "the final solution" and the quest for "a master race." After James von Brunn’s rampage at the Holocaust museum, Beck rushed onto Fox News to describe the Obama-hating killer as a "lone gunman nutjob." Yet in the same show Beck also said von Brunn was a symptom that "the pot in America is boiling," as if Beck himself were not the boiling pot cheering the kettle on.

We have a real right-wing media accountability moment. Ask yourself how this compares to the mainstream media's current obsession over David Letterman's apology to Palin.

Shouldn't they be more concerned about the harm caused by the shrill pundits of the right?

Seeing "a strange double standard in effect" here, Karr feels the murders to be so "horrible that it's silly to have to compare it to the Letterman/Palin affair. And yet the mainstream media seems to think that one deserves more attention than the other."

"If media reports are to be believed," Gabriel Arana of the Nation writes (5/27/09), "an Armageddon-like rash of drug-related violence--unlike any seen since 'Miami Vice years of the 1980s'--has crossed from Mexico into the United States, 'just as government officials had feared.'" But that's a pretty big if, even though "in the national media, it's become a foregone conclusion that Mexican drug violence has penetrated the United States":

But the numbers tell a different story. According to crime statistics for American cities along the U.S.-Mexico border and major U.S. metro areas along drug routes, violent crimes, including robberies, have either decreased in the first part of 2009 or remained relatively stable. This is not to say that the increased violence in Mexico has had no impact in the United States or that no violence in the United States can be traced to the conflict in Mexico. Rather, the drive not to get "scooped" by competitors has led media outlets to conclude prematurely--based on hearsay and isolated incidents--that a wave of drug-related violence is upon us....

Among the earliest reports that potential violence had become actual violence was an AP story that credited unnamed "authorities" with the news. Tellingly, the story did not contain a single direct quote stating either that violence had increased or that it was linked to the drug trade. Rather, it juxtaposed its broad claims against gruesome descriptions of drug violence in Mexico or wildly speculative quotes about what could happen here.

"Nevertheless," Arana tells us, "within weeks the New York Times jumped on the story: "Wave of Drug Violence Is Creeping Into Arizona From Mexico, Officials Say." See, from the three-part cover story, "Media Patrol the Border," in the currently print-only edition of Extra: "Does Violence 'Spill Over' or Come Home to Roost?" (6/09) by Daniel Hernandez

Reporting on how "Jay Severin, the fiery right-wing talkshow host on Boston's WTKK-FM radio station, was suspended yesterday," (5/1/09), the Boston Globe's David Abel lists just a few of the "fiery" jock's "incendiary comments":

In one of his broadcasts this week, Severin said: "So now, in addition to venereal disease and the other leading exports of Mexico--women with mustaches and VD--now we have swine flu."

Later, he described Mexicans as "the world's lowest of primitives."

"When we are the magnet for primitives around the world--and it's not the primitives' fault by the way, I'm not blaming them for being primitives--I'm merely observing they're primitive," he said.

He added that Mexicans are destroying schools and hospitals in the United States. He also criticized their hygiene.

"It's millions of leeches from a primitive country come here to leech off you and, with it, they are ruining the schools, the hospitals, and a lot of life in America," he said.

He added: "We should be, if anything, surprised that Mexico has not visited upon us poxes of more various and serious types already, considering the number of criminaliens already here."

With such a menagerie of hateful statements in just one show, it's perhaps unsurprising that WTKK's spokesperson had trouble picking the one Severin is actually being disciplined for, having "declined to say which of his comments... sparked the suspension." On the other hand, it's not really possible that WTKK has been blind to Severin's true nature this whole time--as Abel tells us:

On a 2004 broadcast, he compared U.S. Muslims to a fifth column, and when a caller suggested that the United States should befriend Muslims, Severin responded: "You think we should befriend them; I think we should kill them."... Severin has also been criticized over the years for falsely saying that he had won a Pulitzer Prize and that he had earned a master's degree from Boston University.

It's worth remembering that in 2005, a year after these genocidal comments, MSNBC gave Severin a job co-hosting a show. Luckily, the show's main host was Tucker Carlson, so few people watched it.

The Southern Poverty Law Center's Mark Potok (HateWatch, 2/13/09) gives a review of Ann Coulter's lengthy history of "sliming everyone and everything she disagrees with" before disclosing that, "despite denouncing school desegregation as a 'spectacular' failure, Coulter has generally avoided bolstering white supremacist hate groups. Until now, that is":

In her latest foaming-mouth tome--Guilty: Liberal "Victims" and Their Assault on America, released on January 6--Coulter spends the better part of three pages defending a group called the Council of Conservative Citizens (CCC), which the New York Times had described as a "thinly veiled white supremacist organization." Coulter begs to differ. The CCC, Coulter opines, is "a conservative group" that has unfairly been branded as racist "because some of the directors of the CCC had, decades earlier, been leaders of a segregationist group."...

Coulter could hardly be more wrong.... The CCC's columnists have written that black people are "a retrograde species of humanity," and that non-white immigration is turning the U.S. population into a "slimy brown mass of glop." Its website has run photographic comparisons of pop singer Michael Jackson and a chimpanzee. It opposes "forced integration" and decries racial intermarriage. It has lambasted black people as "genetically inferior," complained about "Jewish power brokers," called gay people "perverted sodomites," and even named the late Lester Maddox, the baseball bat-wielding, arch-segregationist former governor of Georgia, "Patriot of the Century."

Potok explains that Coulter "really ought to know" this, since "the organization where she frequently speaks, the Conservative Political Action Committee, has publicly banned the CCC from its annual gathering because it is racist."

Read how, crank though she may be, Ann Coulter is one of a class of media figures that facilitates the spread of such hate into much larger venues--see the FAIR magazine Extra!: "Academic Racists Make Mainstream Inroads: From National Review to the New York Times" (3-4/05) by Steve Rendall.

For more on the Council of Conservative Citizens, see FAIR Press Release: "National Media Should Cover Racist Links of Prominent Elected Officials Like Rep. Bob Barr and Sen. Trent Lott" (12/11/98)

There was an Editorial Observer piece in the New York Times today (12/4/08) that really read like a piece from the segregated South of the 1950s, taking the side of the Jim Crow-enforcing sheriff against the outside agitators.

The piece described an event at a church in Patchogue, N.Y., that encouraged immigrants to talk about hidden hate crimes in a community where a gang had allegedly targeted immigrants for a string of assaults that went unreported until the crimes escalated into the murder of Ecuadorean Marcelo Lucero. The church's pastor, working with an activist group, got immigrant crime victims to record their stories and tried to hook them up with lawyers. Then they held a press conference.

By the New York Times' account, that's pretty much all that happened. But in the Times' telling, it was headlined as "A Hate-Crime Circus." Times editorial writer Lawrence Downes described it as a "guilt fiesta," bizarrely equating it in his lead with the stabbing that it was a response to--both were "crimes against immigrants."

In the role of the put-upon sheriff trying to keep the Freedom Riders from stirring up the local colored folk, Downes has the Patchogue Mayor Paul Pontieri, Jr., who "kept a rueful watch from the edge of the circus ring":

Mr. Pontieri has spent a lot of time getting to know his Latino neighbors better and insists that they are not angry. There is confusion and sadness, he said, but the anger--like the teens accused of killing Mr. Lucero--comes from outside.

(Actually, the accused teens didn't come from very far outside Patchogue; some of them came from East Patchogue, while the others came from Medford, which is close enough to have the same high school.)

Downes thinks of himself as an advocate for immigrants. With friends like these, who needs enemies?