From the moment Arizona’s Governor Jan Brewer signed her state’s much maligned immigration bill (SB 1070) into law on April 23, 2010, mainstream news outlets voiced outrage as part of their attempt to carry water for Obama administration, water they’ve carried some two and half months now, while they waited for Obama & Company to decide what they might do to stop Brewer.
And now they’ve decided to sue, as news broke earlier today that Attorney General Eric Holder is filing suit to keep the immigration law from going into effect.
The Associated Press’ (AP) story on Obama’s course of action states that: “The federal lawsuit escalates the volatile national debate on illegal immigration.” Nowhere, however, does the story mention the role the AP and other news outlets played in creating the “volatile…debate.” Instead, it’s as if Brewer signed the bill and outrage ensued without any provocation from the media whatsoever.
What provided a platform for the left-wing politicians pushing for a boycott of Arizona if not the media?
To put it another way: What are the odds that Al Sharpton would have come out of hiding and promised a march on Phoenix if he wasn’t sure the media was going to give him some coverage? And when he made good on his promise, and actually marched on Phoenix, the media was there to bring us the details, as Sharpton knew they would be.
Simply put, there has been a deluge of coverage on the negative reactions to Arizona’s immigration bill while there has been very little honest coverage on the actual content of the bill. (I guess telling the public that the bill basically contains the same immigration mandates as found in federal statutes just doesn’t arouse the emotion necessary to sell papers or attract viewers.)
However, there has been plenty of dishonest coverage of Arizona’s pending law. It’s almost a return to the muckraking style of journalism that sought to exaggerate, presume the exaggerations as true, and once the story was accepted, to start all over again. In the end, this cycle continued until journalism was just so much hype.
And perhaps “hype” is the best word that can be used to describe the way mainstream news outlets have handled the Arizona immigration law to this point. They have carried water for Obama & Co., either by design or by default, and now that the federal lawsuit is filed the same reporters who brought us Sharpton are trying to act surprised that it’s all really come to this.
We would have been better served if media outlets had imitated the small town police officer who handles a traffic accident with the familiar line, “move on, there’s nothing to see here.” But instead, they decided to imitate the kook in the theater who yells “fire!”
And now they have a whole new story to cover.
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