Is Cable News the Real Problem?
Friday, June 06, 2008

Over the course of the presidential primary campaign, I spent significantly more time tuned-in to prime time cable news shows than usual. When I finally came up for air after Senator Barack Obama seems to clinch the Democratic Party nomination, I was left troubled by the level of bias and spin, not only in election coverage, but also in environment reporting, the war in Iraq, and especially immigration.

Before we could finish our own commentary on this subject, Media Matters Action Network beat us to the punch with a scathing report documenting exactly how prominent cable news programs "serve up a steady diet of fear, anger and resentment" against immigration in general and illegal aliens in particular, using a combination of biased commentary and urban legends. Here is what they found:

Lou Dobbs, Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity, Brit Hume, Michelle Malkin and other conservatives consistently distort the level of crime committed by undocumented immigrants, misstate the costs of illegal immigration, and perpetuate urban myths including the risk of Americans contracting leprosy from immigrants.

For example, in 2007, Lou Dobbs Tonight devoted 94 episodes to his ongoing illegal alien crime wave rants, despite the fact that undocumented immigrants are actually five times less likely to commit crimes than native-born Americans. The O’Reilly Factor and Glenn Beck devoted fewer episodes to immigrant crime, but joined Dobbs by endlessly repeating crime by illegal aliens without regard for the statistical relevance.

Similarly, Lou Dobbs accuses illegal immigrants of draining away huge segments of social services monies by avoiding taxes. However, the fact is that they pay for themselves via payroll and other taxes. According to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office, "tax revenues for all types generated by immigrants – both legal and unauthorized – exceed the cost of the services they use". Furthermore even legal immigrants are ineligible to receive most social benefits (social security, health care, public education, etc.) for the first five years they reside in the U.S. or until they become citizens.

Yet another popular conservative myth is of widespread voter fraud by undocumented immigrants. Once again, Lou Dobbs is the chief propagandist. The fact is that multiple studies have confirmed that voter fraud is extremely rare, including a report by the nonpartisan Demo research institute that election fraud is "minimal across the 50 U.S. States and rarely affects election outcomes".

Finally, the leprosy scare would be almost laughable if it were not for the gullibility of many viewers. Lou Dobbs and others claimed that the United States imported more than 7000 cases of leprosy in the past three years from illegal immigrants. The fact is that there were 7000 leprosy cases in the U.S. over the last 30 years, not three years.

Of course, we are not proponents of illegal immigration. However, the perceptions of legal and illegal immigration, especially of the human beings involved, are intertwined, and can become too easily confused and exploited by commentators who sacrifice accuracy for viewership. Immigration issues deserve serious debate and rational thinking, not ill-informed diatribes that often result in demonizing innocent subsets of our population.

One unanswered question is do these (mostly) white conservative talking heads really believe what they are saying or are they just drumming up controversy to get higher ratings? If so, what can or should we do about it?

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posted by J. Stephen Wilson
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