“A lot of white liberals in New York City and Washington DC who run media have found, suddenly, the compassion and love in their heart for immigrants they didn’t know was there,” Ruben Navarrette, Jr., a journalist-turned-syndicated columnist, told Full Measure’s Sharyl Attkisson yesterday, “because for eight years, they didn’t give a crap about the fact that a Democrat and a black president was deporting all these people.”
“But now that Trump is there,” he added, “man, they do care, and do they love immigrants.”
Navarrette is “the most widely read Latino columnist in the country,” and Attkisson billed the interview as an “eye-opening personal insight on how the news is shaped today.”
When asked if editors had ever pressured him to take a specific angle on a story as a Latino, Navarrette answered Yes.
“But you don’t always,” Attkisson noted. “What problem has that posed?”
“I’ve been fired eight times in the course of 30 years,” deadpanned Navarrette. One of those firings was from CNN.
“I was at CNN for a number of years.… covering Barack Obama and the Obama administration’s really terrible record of deportations,” he explained. “Over eight years, the Barack Obama administration deported three million people, separated families, put kids in cages.
“I was told by my boss,” Navarrette disclosed, “I needed to stop writing about that.”
One critical element in achieving immigration reform is to revive, first, the art of actual journalism. We citizens need facts and unbiased information to gain knowledge and, accordingly, instruct our representatives in government.
Spinning stories — or dumping them down the memory hole — in an attempt to push corporate media’s partisan political narratives, on the other hand, casts the press and democratic ideals in darkness.
Regardless of who is president.
This is Common Sense. I’m Paul Jacob.
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