http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/b ... 260820.asp

August 26, 2005, 8:20 a.m.
Dem Coincidences
The mainstream media discover illegal immigration.

By Megan Basham

The other evening, flipping through the nightly news shows looking for anything unrelated to Natalie Holloway or BTK Killer Dennis Rader, my husband made a rather astute observation: “Why is it that all the news shows are suddenly doing 24/7 analysis of the immigration problem? You think they’re trying to help the Democrats?�


He had a point. Problems stemming from illegal immigration have provoked strong feelings among voters for years without sparking much more than an NPR/La Raza lovefest. Granted, local news outlets always cover the theft, violence, and drug busts related to the “undocumented� populations in their towns. But as a national crisis that requires talking heads incessantly to gather at the roundtable, the issue of immigration has remained fairly unvisited since the Reagan era. So why all the attention now?

I decided to test my husband’s hypothesis that the mainstream media’s current immigration craze is merely a bid to bolster Democrats. Using the terms “illegal immigrationâ€? and “border,â€? I ran a full-text LexisNexis search for television-news transcripts in 1999 â€â€