February 20, 2008

To: The editors and ombudsmen of the Chicago Tribune and Baltimore Sun.

I wish to file a formal complaint and request a full retraction of the propaganda hit piece that was conducted by your papers and your employee Whitney Blair Wyckoff, on February 19, 2008, titled "Lou Dobbs for president? One anti-illegal immigration group thinks he's the antidote to 'McClintobama'."

I witness so much bias, politicization, censorship, and corruption of journalistic ethics in the American print media on a daily that I am rarely astounded anymore. This "article" by Ms Wycoff stands as a perfect example of what is wrong with America today. Americans used to trust newspapers to provide them with accurate information and portrayals of the candidates and issues that have a direct impact on the quality of their lives.

It is no surprise that newspaper circulations are taking a dive and that polls show only small fractions of our citizenry place any trust in the print media. This "article" is a perfect example.

The topic of Whitney Blair Wyckoff's article is Lou Dobbs and our website to promote a possible Presidential campaign by Mr. Dobbs. Yet, Mr. Dobbs is not quoted as a source and while our home site at ALIPAC.us or our Draft Dobbs for President site are main features in the article, no links are provided thus allowing Wycoff to define the sites without showing readers where they could go to participate or formulate their own opinions.

Wycoff inserts her own opinions into the article several times. She calls Lou Dobbs "cantankerous" in the first sentence, which is defined as a person that is ill-tempered, quarrelsome; disagreeable: disliked. While this is her opinion and an insult, but it is also a lie because Mr. Dobbs is quite a gentleman and well liked by Americans, which is illustrated by his rapidly growing audience.

Wycoff further injects her personal opinions into the article by calling the immigration plans of the wealthiest candidates "moderate", when in fact their plans would be the most radical change in America's immigration laws in modern history!

Wycoff misrepresents my statements and quotes to her, in dramatic fashion. She claims that I made statements about the anti-immigrant vote. I never used the term "anti-immigrant", as my organization ALIPAC supports legal immigrants and we are pro-immigrant. We have many immigrant supporters, in which we greatly value and thus the name Americans for Legal Immigration! Wycoff wants readers to think that Lou Dobbs and I are both "anti-immigrant", which is false and again shows a political opinion inserted into this article.

Furthermore, Wycoff completely misquoted me as saying, I think people should run America. How stupid is that? What would the alternative be? Perhaps America should be run by robots? No, she distorted my true quote, which is "It's about whether the citizens of America or big business run the United States" but Wycoff claims I said something very different.

The worst of the bias in this article is the fact that only one other source was used and that the writer fails to properly identify Alan I. Abramowitz.

Not only does Wycoff allow Alan I. Abramowitz to make several false and negative statements, but she fails to inform readers that Mr. Abramowitz is a member of the ASK Law Group, which specializes in "Immigration and Naturalization law", according to their website at www.kaflaw.com

The readers of Wycoff's article deserve to know that the source is not an unbiased academic Political Science professor, but in fact he is making money from legal and illegal immigration. Do you think that the fact his income is affected by this issue might have an impact on his opinion of Mr. Dobbs running for President? Most people would think so and that is why this information is excluded.

This is not an article, this is a biased piece of trash that deserves to be thrown in the trash and Ms. Wycoff needs to return to college for some refresher courses on the ethics of journalism.

American citizens deserve better than this kind of political propaganda that is masquerading as news or journalism.

I have added notes and corrections to this article, before I circulate it to the national media and our 25,000 national supporters. You can see our revisions at this link...

Biased Tribune article attacks ALIPAC and the Draft Dobbs effort!
http://www.alipac.us/article2972.html

ALIPAC deserves justice. A full correction or retraction is needed and Ms. Wycoff should be appropriately disciplined by your company.

In closing, one of the most attractive things about Lou Dobbs is that he tells people the truth about what is going on and makes his opinions clear, which is a refreshing reprieve from articles like this one that infect the corporate liberal media in America.

William Gheen
President, Americans for Legal Immigration PAC
www.alipac.us