Gray Lady Down by William McGowan

Author:William McGowan
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Encounter Books
Published: 2010-10-18T16:00:00+00:00

An especially rich target was the Minutemen, a group of armed volunteers patrolling the southern border with the aim of providing information to the Border Patrol on the movements of illegals trying to sneak into the country. The reporter James McKinley called them “self-proclaimed patriots” whose planned “vigilante watch” along the border was “alarming.” Sarah Vowell called them “a nutty experiment” that sprang from America’s “violent nativity,” further maligning them as “grown men playing army on the Mexican border” because they had nothing better to do. One Times story characterized the Minutemen as “anti-immigration,” which the paper later had to retract, admitting that they are only against illegal immigration.

The Minutemen founder Jim Gilchrist was trying to speak at Columbia University in October 2006 when campus radicals stormed the stage. A melee ensued, as security had to whisk Gilchrist off-stage, ending the event. The Times reported some of what happened but omitted some incriminating details, such as students shaking their fists and chanting “Si se pudo, si se pudo,” Spanish for “Yes we could!” Others unrolled a banner that read “No one is ever illegal,” in Arabic as well as English. But these bits of color were left to other news organizations to report.

Triumphalist hurrahs infused the Times’ coverage of the large-scale protests by illegal immigrants demanding amnesty in the spring of 2006. Few photographs showed the seas of Mexican flags, and the demonstrators’claims that borders are unnecessary because we’re all “one big American landmass” didn’t find their way into print.

Meanwhile, the Times condemned almost any effort at border enforcement or interior immigration control. Raids on overcrowded immigrant housing on Long Island—such as the modest-sized residence where sixty-four men lived—were denounced, and the targets were quoted as declaring that they were being treated worse than dogs. These raids were painted in totally racial terms and likened to the segregation formerly practiced against blacks. “It’s like we’re going backwards,” one activist told the Times.

Unsurprisingly, the paper was apoplectic over Arizona’s plans to arrest and deport illegal immigrants in April 2010. The new law was passed in response to drug violence spreading across the border from Mexico, compounding the criminality already associated with rampant immigrant smuggling. The most contested provision entailed permitting local police to arrest and hold people for federal immigration authorities if there was “a reasonable suspicion” they were illegal, after encountering them in the course of traffic stops, domestic violence calls and other routine law enforcement actions.

When the Arizona law was signed, Randal Archibold gave plenty of room in his report for opponents to condemn it as “a recipe for racial and ethnic profiling,” and as “an open invitation for harassment and discrimination against Hispanics regardless of their citizenship status.” Archibold quoted Cardinal Roger Mahoney of Los Angeles saying that demanding residency documents was equivalent to “Nazism.” He said the bill’s author, state senator Russell Pearce, was regarded as a “politically incorrect embarrassment by more moderate members of his party.”

It was in editorial and op-ed commentary that the Times really foamed at the mouth, however.

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