Soon, Nifong was taken off the case. The attorney general of North Carolina, Roy Cooper, took over and released a scathing report at the end of April 2007, thirteen months after the ordeal began. Of the accuser, the report charged:In meetings with the special prosecutors, the accusing witness, when recounting the events of that night, changed her story on so many important issues as to give the impression she was improvising as the interviews progressed, even when she was faced with irrefutable evidence that what she was saying was not credible.... The accusing witness attempted to avoid the contradictions by changing her story, contradicting previous stories or alleging the evidence was fabricated.
KC Johnson, author of the Durham-in-Wonderland blog, quoted Cooper’s statement that “a lot of people owe a lot of apologies to, to other people. I think that those people ought to consider doing that.” Johnson went on to specify who should start apologizing: the Times columnists Selena Roberts and Harvey Araton, the reporter Duff Wilson, and the paper’s senior editors.
As one Duke student asked, if the Times had restrained its coverage a little bit, or perhaps been more skeptical, “would the entire story, the entire case, the entire ‘perfect storm’ have been the same? Would it still have been a story of such national prominence if The Times had run something else on its front page?” As the case collapsed, Daniel Okrent added: “If and when The Times does a big story on what went wrong in the Duke case, unless they’re a part of the story, unless they report on themselves, it will be an incomplete story.” Okrent liked to imagine an apology that would candidly say, “We blew it. We’re sorry. We accept responsibility for having blown it.”
But that mea culpa never came. Editorials denouncing Nifong ran in other papers, including the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal and USA Today. But not in the New York Times. Stuart Taylor and KC Johnson’s book on the case, Until Proven Innocent: Political Correctness and the Shameful Injustices of the Duke Lacrosse Rape Case, came out in 2007. The Times Book Review devoted only two sentences to the scores of passages that eviscerated the paper’s coverage of the case.
five
immigration
The narrative about “a nation of immigrants” is a powerful American ideal, and so there’s always been a certain measure of romanticism in reporting on immigrants. But the New York Times’ willingness to recast the narrative as “a nation of victims” is so striking that it seems a calculated act of journalistic aggression. The paper has either ignored, miscovered or muted the less appealing realities of immigration—especially those involving the illegal immigration that has threatened to swamp the southwestern part of the country in recent decades.
First there are the blatant sins of omission: fully newsworthy stories that are salient to various facets of the immigration debate, but don’t get reported at all. They are airbrushed out of the record, Pravda-like.• In Denver in 2007, a Mexican illegal alien dragged a woman to death after beating her. The man had been arrested before, but was released after one night even though he had a crudely forged ID card, which was returned to him. The story got no coverage by the Times.
• In Tennessee in 2007, an illegal alien committed vehicular manslaughter, killing a husband and wife, Sean and Donna Wilson. It was found that the perpetrator had fourteen prior arrests but had done no jail time. Local commentators, such as the syndicated radio talk show host Phil Valentine, voiced the possibility that politicians, judges and prosecutors—all Democrats—were going easy on such offenders to court the Latino vote. Again, no coverage in the Times.
• In New York, as around the country, illegals are overrepresented in hit-and-run accidents—as perpetrators, not victims. But instead of exploring this trend, the Times chooses to emphasize the more multiculturally correct side of the coin: stories where illegal immigrants are victims of vehicular accidents. In 2009, Lawrence Downes wrote an editorial about immigrants leading “quiet but precarious” lives who have been killed while traveling the streets of Long Island suburbs on foot or bicycle, because they could not afford a car.
• In New Haven, Connecticut, in March 2009, an illegal Mexican busboy asked a 25-year-old waitress, with whom he had worked for a year, for a ride home. The man punched the woman in the face, knocking her out of the car. He proceeded to smash her cell phone, beat her and rape her. Then he drove to a more secluded location, where he raped and beat her again, this time trying to kill her by hitting her with tree branches and trying to gouge out her eyes. The victim played dead, and later crawled to a nearby house for help. Despite the heinousness of the crime, the Times chose not to cover it, even though it routinely covers other developments in New Haven, including the controversies over granting identity cards to illegal immigrants, and the immigrant community’s fears over federal raids on illegal immigrants with outstanding arrest warrants.
• The Times did a piece on how happy immigrant parents were with ethnically themed public charter schools, dismissing concerns about assimilation by quoting ethnic studies professors saying that these parents were being “as American as apple pie.” Meanwhile, the paper has ignored the workings of a Muslim charter school outside Minneapolis where public monies are being spent to advance an Islamist agenda. Although the ACLU was looking into the school to determine whether it violated the Constitution’s establishment clause, and anti-jihadi watchdog groups were calling for the school’s deaccreditation, the Times didn’t go near it.
• In 2009, responding to an online discussion among Muslim students at MIT about the Islamic position on death for apostasy, Harvard’s Muslim chaplain Taha Abdul-Basser told the students that “there is great wisdom (hikma) associated with the established and preserved position (capital punishment) and so, even if it makes some uncomfortable in the face of the hegemonic modern human rights discourse, one should not dismiss it out of hand.” Concerned Harvard alumni, both Muslim and non-Muslim, wrote the school to complain, some calling for Abdul-Basser’s removal. This is exactly the sort of story the Times would have jumped at if ethnic sensitivities were not involved. But the Times ignored it.
• In mid 2010, a 21-year-old Indian girl filed suit for “slavery and peonage” against an Indian government official posted to the United Nations who, ironically, was known as a champion of women’s rights. Brought into the United States illegally as a minor in 2007 by the diplomat and her husband, who had lied to immigration authorities, the girl charged that she was forced to work sixteen hours a day, seven days a week; that she slept on the floor of the Indian mission to the U.N. and was often starved; that she received little of the pittance she was promised, and was told that if she attempted to leave, “the police would beat and arrest her” and send her back to India as “cargo.” MSNBC, the Boston Globe, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Fresno Bee, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Post all ran the story. But despite the obvious news angle of a supposed women’s rights crusader being sued for “slavery and peonage,” as well as a foreign diplomat lying to U.S. authorities, the Times did not do the story.
• In early November 2009, a member of the ruthless Salvadoran gang MS-13, who was a legal immigrant from El Salvador, confessed to authorities that he had been hired by a gang leader in his home country to arrange the assassination of a ranking Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent who had led a crackdown on the gang’s New York operations. The plot’s revelation led to a “blitz” of arrests, as the New York Daily News put it, involving hundreds of federal agents. The attempt to murder the ICE agent came as Central American criminal violence, particularly the intimidation of law enforcement and criminal justice officials, had begun seeping into the United States, which certainly made the assassination plot newsworthy, as did the cross-border nature of the attempted hit, the forceful federal response to it, and the local New York angle. Yet the Times did not report on it, prompting Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies to say, “What’s it gonna take for the Times to report something like this? The beheading of a federal j
udge?”
In addition to such conspicuous silences, the paper’s immigration reporting is marked by sins of commission too—by underreported and ideologically one-sided stories where significant information and salient facts have been avoided, deflected or euphemized to the point where the information lacuna causes the reader to lose the essence of what the story is really about and what has really taken place.
• In what many considered a Muslim “honor killing” in Buffalo, New York, a prominent Pakistani-born Muslim executive of a television network—which he established to fight stereotypes about Islam—stabbed and beheaded his wife in 2009 after she had served him with divorce papers and obtained a restraining order to keep him away from their house and children, following a long pattern of abuse and violence. Despite the heinous details and the culturally inflammatory nature of the crime, which cut to the issue of Muslim compatibility with American norms, it took a week for the Times to get on the story. When it did, the Web report described the decapitation euphemistically. Times reports also carried copious denials that the murder was an “honor killing” from Muslim advocacy groups.
• The Times gave incomplete information on a 2006 story from Maywood, California, where an American flag was stomped on by illegal aliens demanding amnesty, and a Mexican flag was hoisted in its place. In addition to minimizing the number of Mexican and Central American flags at the protest, the Times scrubbed some of the rhetoric at this demonstration and others, such as comments by groups like La Raza that Mexicans are involved in the Reconquista of lands stolen by gringos long ago.
• The Times has given short shrift to the way towns and cities with high densities of illegal immigrants have undermined immigration laws. Many have enacted so-called “sanctuary laws” making it illegal for local officials, including police, to report illegal aliens to federal authorities unless they have committed major crimes. Maywood, where the U.S. flag was stomped, has gone even further. As Heather Mac Donald explained in City Journal, it “abolished its drunk-driving checkpoints, because they were nabbing too many illegal aliens. Next, this 96 percent Latino city, almost half of whose adult population lacks a ninth-grade education, disbanded its police traffic division entirely, so that illegals wouldn’t need to worry about having their cars towed for being unlicensed. . . . At a March 2006 city council meeting in Maywood, a resident suggested that a councilmember was using English as a sign of disrespect.” The Times ignored these developments.
• The Times did report on a caste-based killing in Chicago, where in 2008 an Indian immigrant set fire to his pregnant daughter’s apartment over a “cultural slight.” The fire killed four people—the daughter, her husband, and their three-year-old child. The Times noted that the father was angry that his daughter married without permission and that the husband was of a lower caste. But it gave no sense of the presence of caste-related violence and resentment in the United States, as represented by the many high-caste wealthy Indian couples who bring over lower-caste girls as servants but wind up sexually exploiting and physically abusing them. Most of these cases have gone unreported. When the Times has reported on caste, it says—against considerable evidence to the contrary—that the tradition is “withering.”
• In January 2008, when a Mexican American U.S. Marine was shot by cops in the largely Mexican immigrant town of Ceres, California, after shooting one policeman and wounding another, the Times reported that he was under stress because of an order to return to Iraq for another tour and was not in one of the gangs that dominate the town. The account was threaded with quotes from friends saying that the Marine was “a good Mexican boy” and that he “died like a real Mexican, standing up.” Soon after-word, Michelle Malkin reported that in fact he did have gang associations, showing pictures of him with gang paraphernalia, and that he was high on coke. Malkin also reported that he was not being redeployed to Iraq and had never served there—confabulated assertions in the Times report.
• In December 2007, a woman was savagely raped in a Queens park by four Mexican illegals. Once arrested, they were found to have long rap sheets and a long record of missed court appearances, which made them deportable. The Times did not report their illegal status, referring to them merely as “homeless men.” Nor did it connect the dots back to New York City’s sanctuary policies, which protected three of the four from deportation for offenses such as assault, attempted robbery, criminal trespass, illegal gun possession and drug offenses. Around this time, however, the Times hailed Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s reversal of a proposal that city workers check identities of illegals, declaring that doing so would “deny privacy rights for immigrants” and that “at the end of the day mandatory status disclosure would hurt everyone’s public safety” by “chilling illegals from coming forward to report crime and abuse.”
• The Times has given protective coverage to intolerant acts by immigrant Muslims. A case in point was the threats by fellow Muslims against an imam in Brooklyn because of the relatively liberal views he expressed to Andrea Elliott for her three-part series “An Imam in America.” Elliott did not report these threats—which encouraged the imam to relocate to New Jersey—until nearly a year after he started receiving them. While her stories acknowledged many negative things about the imam, the series as a whole was largely positive, sparking controversy.
The Times’ journalistic lapses, failures and blunders on the immigration issue do not stem from deadline pressure, a lack of newsroom resources and personnel, or carelessness. Rather, they stem from a slavish devotion to the ideology of diversity, along with wishful thinking, naiveté, double standards, social distance, elite guilt, intellectual dishonesty, historical shallowness and old-fashioned partisanship.
The paper’s reluctance to face the realities of illegal immigration squarely is reflected in its queasy coverage of alien criminality, as well as the different attitudes, values and customs that some immigrant groups bring as baggage, and the implications these differences carry for the American tradition of assimilation. The relativism that the Times brings to its reporting on these subjects, as well as the issue of dual citizenship and divided loyalty, suggests an attempt to undermine the ideal of assimilation as a “dated, even racist concept.”
Two things appear to be driving immigration reporting. The first is a failure of confidence in America and its history—a “punitive liberalism,” as James Piereson has called it, or “penitential narcissism” in Oriana Fallaci’s phrase. The second driver is an intellectual and journalistic framework that romanticizes “the Other” and shrugs off the question of a Latinization or Islamization of American culture as if it were meaningless. Like other liberal institutions, the Times puts the “human rights” of illegal immigrants ahead of the collective right of ordinary American citizens to decide who should be allowed to immigrate and who should not—thereby essentially voiding one of the most fundamental aspects of any country’s sovereignty.
At the Times, pressure has steadily increased to erase the distinction between “legal” and “illegal” immigration. As Randal Archibold wrote in April 2006, there is “the awkward question of who is legal and how much it should matter.” Officially, the paper’s style guide says a distinction should be made, but the newsroom reflects a calculated confusion. Sometimes headlines will use the word “migrant”; the text of reports may use “undocumented worker,” “undocumented migrant,” or “immigrants who are undocumented.” The Times rarely uses the term “illegal alien.” A 2004 story headlined “160 Migrants Seized at Upscale Arizona Home” was obviously about illegal immigrants being smuggled into the country, but the headline refused to say so.
One editorial writer, Lawrence Downes, gave an explanation for the evasive vocabulary when he wrote that “America has a big problem with illegal immigration, but a big part of it stems from the word ‘illegal.’ It pollutes the debate. It blocks solutions. Used dispassionately and technically, there is nothing wrong with it. Used as an irreducible modifier for a large and largely decent grou
p of people, it is badly damaging. And as a code word for racial and ethnic hatred, it is detestable.” Many readers thought this was moral preening on Downes’ part—and offensive to boot. Wrote one:I am repeatedly frustrated by the implication by Lawrence Downes and others that by default those who oppose illegal immigration are promoting (or at the very least laying the ground for) a racist agenda. The word “illegal” is not a dirty word. It is to the point and honest, as it spells out the obvious difference in this case between those who are here lawfully and those who are not. To suggest that it is a “code word for racial and ethnic hatred” is disingenuous at best and only adds fuel to the fire. It has been used over and over in an attempt to stifle honest discussion on this topic as well as on a range of others.
The Times also shows its bias in the numbers it chooses to report. In a mid-2009 panel discussion, Jeffrey Passel of the Pew Research Center estimated that nearly one million illegal immigrants enter America annually, but the Times has used the figure of 400,000 and doesn’t acknowledge the discrepancy, much less explain it.
While minimizing the numbers of illegal immigrants, the Times plays down the social costs they impose as well. According to William Bratton, former police chief of Los Angeles, gang violence is “the emerging monster of crime in America.” At least 90 percent of all the outstanding homicide warrants in Los Angeles are for illegal immigrant criminals, most of them gangbangers. Because of their social marginality, immigrant children are particularly likely to be seduced by the gang culture. But the New York Times has often reported on gangs as if they were created by the United States itself, and as if deporting alleged gang members were a human rights abuse. Pieces such as Ginger Thompson’s September 2004 report called “Tattooed Warriors: Shuttling Between Nations, Latino Gangs Confound the Law” rarely involve interviews with victims of immigrant gang crime, and seldom reveal that expelling gang members helps reduce crime in Los Angeles and other cities.
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