Results 1 to 3 of 3

Thread Information

Users Browsing this Thread

There are currently 1 users browsing this thread. (0 members and 1 guests)

  1. #1
    Senior Member JohnDoe2's Avatar
    Join Date
    Aug 2008
    Location
    PARADISE (San Diego)
    Posts
    99,040

    The media deportation of Jose Antonio Vargas

    The media deportation of Jose Antonio Vargas

    Journalism's self-appointed guardians have denounced Vargas's deception with no regard for the realities of his immigrant status

    Daniel Denvir
    guardian.co.uk, Monday 27 June 2011 16.11 BST

    In an already much discussed New York Times Magazine article, 30-year-old Filipino-American journalist Jose Antonio Vargas disclosed that he is an undocumented immigrant brought to the United States at the age of 12.

    The story was moving: a young man committed to being an American and to being a journalist, forced to keep his true identity in the shadows as he pursued a reporter's life in the headlines. After I finished reading the story and reflecting on the brutal reality of the immigration status quo, I confronted something troubling but predictable among the commentariat: old scolds reviving the most tired and hackneyed tropes of mainstream media ethics.

    Slate's Jack Shafer asks "readers … [to] table any forgiveness until they think through the full dimension of his deceptions," the diabolical intricacies of "his con". "There's something about this guy," muses Shafer, "to make a journalist's nose itch."

    Shafer goes on to scratch that itch because, of course, lying about one's immigration status to get a job butchering chickens in Iowa is one thing. Someone, and not Jack Shafer, needs to butcher our chickens. Lying to your editor about immigration status, apparently, is another.

    I get on my high horse about Vargas's lies because reporter-editor relationships are based on trust. A news organisation can't function if editors must constantly cross-examine their reporters in search of deliberate lies. I'm more disturbed with Vargas for lying to the Washington Post Co (which – disclosure alert! – employs me) than I am about him breaking immigration law. His lies to the Post violated the compact that makes journalism possible.

    Lying about his immigration status, of course, is the only way that Vargas could be the truth-telling journalist he deserved to be.

    This is an old canard: a journalist who lies about anything cannot be trusted to tell the truth about anything. Yet Vargas is no Jason Blair or Stephen Glass. Lying to your readers about the facts of a story is a misrepresentation wholly unlike lying to your editor about whether your driver's licence is real. Shafer disagrees, saying – with zero evidence – that Vargas must have gotten "too good at" lying.

    The trouble with habitual liars, and Vargas confesses to having told lie after lie to protect himself from deportation, is that they tend to get too good at it. Lying becomes reflex. And a confessed liar is not somebody you want working on your newspaper … I'm honest because I know that if you violate your editor's trust, you're a goner for good reason.

    Jack Shafer, you are also honest about your citizenship status because you are not an undocumented immigrant. And neither am I. The US government doesn't force us to lie about who we are just to go about our daily lives. Vargas took small, inherently fraught actions to make his way through a thoroughly impossible situation.

    The second great canard of journalistic ethics advanced by the establishment is a rather bigoted one: Vargas's former editor at the San Francisco Chronicle, editor-at-large Phil Bronstein, told NPR's On the Media that Vargas could not objectively report on immigration because he is an undocumented immigrant.

    "There is a fundamental conflict there where full disclosure would normally be required, but since no one but Jose knew about it, it wasn't required and we didn't get it."

    A citizen of the United States is no more qualified or less caught up in a conflict of interest over the immigration debate than a non-citizen, undocumented or otherwise. And crucially, no one has alleged factual inaccuracies in Vargas's reporting, and there is no serious reason to believe that they exist.

    Opponents of gay marriage recently deployed a similar argument, moving to vacate federal judge Vaughn Walker's ruling against California's proposition 8 on the grounds that Judge Vaughn is a gay man in a long-term relationship. Chief US district judge James Ware ruled against the suit-and-tie homophobes, stating that:

    "[T]he fact that a federal judge shares a fundamental characteristic with a litigant, or shares membership in a large association such as a religion, has been categorically rejected by federal courts as a sole basis for requiring a judge to recuse her or himself."

    Bronstein disagrees: "I think that Jose has disqualified himself from being a journalist – he is now an advocate," though he concedes, "I kind of understood that there were circumstances that I couldn't really understand myself given my life experience." How generous.

    Bronstein, whose Chronicle piece was awarded the pathetic and seething title "I was duped by Jose Vargas, illegal immigrant," went on to call Vargas a "consummate self-promoter, that's one of the ways he was able to survive with this big secret hanging over him".

    That's just mean – and plain unsubstantiated.

    Vargas, of course, isn't the kind of guy who is supposed to win the game. Instead of white privilege, wealth and an Ivy League education, we have a young man who must go to every end to make a life for himself: procuring two false driver's licences, avoiding international travel and, in doing so, not seeing his mother for nearly two decades, all the while being gay. And he not only makes a life for himself, but shares a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting at the Washington Post before the age of 30.

    Once again, the myth of journalism as a gentleman's club for above-the-fray, apolitical supermen is shattered. Hence the angry response from the crusty old white guys. Instead of taking the opportunity to rethink the immigration debate ("wow, an undocumented immigrant could be anyone, even a talented journalist"), Shafer and Bronstein opt for a pity party in defence of the ideologically bankrupt status quo of mainstream journalism.

    Angry men like Bronstein are bad readers of tragedy. Here was a man trying to be honourable under impossible circumstances. There was no way Vargas could be honest without either settling for a low-wage, backbreaking job or leaving the country he grew up in. The premise of the journalistic scolds is that being an undocumented immigrant disqualifies you from being a serious journalist – or a serious anything other than, perhaps, a janitor.

    Vargas is a man persecuted by unjust laws for being who he is – an undocumented immigrant – trying to live not just a normal, but an extraordinary, life. For that, he should be applauded. Meanwhile, Bronstein and others in the journalism establishment are rewriting Vargas's tragedy as a boilerplate melodrama, with themselves playing the victims.

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree ... publishing
    NO AMNESTY

    Don't reward the criminal actions of millions of illegal aliens by giving them citizenship.


    Sign in and post comments here.

    Please support our fight against illegal immigration by joining ALIPAC's email alerts here https://eepurl.com/cktGTn

  2. #2
    Senior Member
    Join Date
    May 2006
    Location
    Nebraska
    Posts
    2,892
    The OBL is busy posting comments. They were even bashing Alipac and NumbersUSA What a bunch of losers!

  3. #3
    Senior Member JohnDoe2's Avatar
    Join Date
    Aug 2008
    Location
    PARADISE (San Diego)
    Posts
    99,040
    NO AMNESTY

    Don't reward the criminal actions of millions of illegal aliens by giving them citizenship.


    Sign in and post comments here.

    Please support our fight against illegal immigration by joining ALIPAC's email alerts here https://eepurl.com/cktGTn

Posting Permissions

  • You may not post new threads
  • You may not post replies
  • You may not post attachments
  • You may not edit your posts
  •