But he "recently found myself scratching my head" over a "Pan American Health Organization press release that 'the new virus, which emerged in Mexico and the United States in April,' has spread to 74 countries." Follow-up questions put to one of the organization's spokespeople brought the reply that "it's not clear that this pandemic started in Mexico.... We may never know in which country it started."

But none of this stopped the usual crowd of hyperventilating anti-immigration--or rather, anti-Hispanic immigration--radio and cable television hotheads from pointing at Mexico as the unequivocal origin of the disease.

According to the Media Matters, a liberal watchdog group, conservative-nationalist radio talk show host Michael Savage said on April 24, "Make no mistake about it: Illegal aliens are the carriers of the new strain of human-swine avian flu from Mexico."

In another example of irresponsible journalism cited by the watchdog group, Fox's contributor Michelle Malkin wrote in her blog on April 25, "Hey, maybe we'll finally get serious about borders now." She added, "I've blogged for years about the spread of contagious diseases from around the world into the U.S. as a result of uncontrolled immigration."

On April 27, CNN's Lou Dobbs started his nightly show saying, "We begin with dire new warnings about the worsening outbreak of swine flu. This outbreak is spreading from Mexico to the United States and around the world."

Indeed, Oppenheimer gives us the charming fact that "some radio and cable-television presenters called it the 'Mexican flu.'"

The Herald reporter doesn't claim to "have an answer for how this story should have been reported early on," but he posits that, "just as scientists are looking into the history of the H1N1 outbreak to learn how to better handle future pandemics, we in the media should look at how to handle these kinds of stories more responsibly in the future"--and, crucially, "expose reckless charlatans for what they are."

Listen to the FAIR radio program CounterSpin: "Bart Laws on Swine Flu" (5/8/09).

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.