Posted by Meredith Dake Feb 4th 2011 at 4:58 am in ABC, Featured Story, Mainstream Media, media bias ABC reporter John Quinones produced a deceptive propaganda piece about the recent Arizona law (SB1070) dealing with illegal immigration. John Quinones, with the support of ABC, again peddles the mainstream media meme that anyone who is for the enforcement of our immigration laws is “anti-immigration” or “anti-immigrant.” But Quinones (and, by extension, ABC) doesn’t stop there. He goes on to completely misrepresent the law (using the Media Matters talking point) by framing the issue this way:
“So, we took our cameras down to Arizona, where a controversial, new law would give police the authority to question and perhaps deport anyone who, in their eyes, appears to be in the U.S. illegally. So, I go undercover, pretending to be someone who is about to be arrested and deported, simply by the way I look.”The misinformation and ignorance in that statement would be laughable if it weren’t so infuriating. Here’s the full clip:
Skimming over the fact that ABC even hatching the idea of this expose’ is revealing to show how these East Coast ABC newsies clearly believe that everyone from Arizona who supported the law is racist and for racial profiling, the framing of this issue is rejected by the facts of the law:
Page 1 Line 20 of SB1070 clearly states:
“FOR ANY LAWFUL CONTACT MADE BY A LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICIAL OR AGENCY OF THIS STATE OR A COUNTY, CITY, TOWN OR OTHER POLITICAL SUBDIVISION OF THIS STATE FOR ANY LAWFUL CONTACT MADE BY A LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICIAL OR AGENCY OF THIS STATE OR A COUNTY, CITY, TOWN OR OTHER POLITICAL SUBDIVISION OF THIS STATE…”
In other words, a law enforcement officer, not a mall cop, (a person who is private security for a building) – who is not a law enforcement officer or an agent of the state – must have lawful contact with a person before being able to fulfill any other provisions of this law. A mall cop can’t, with authority of the state, ask a person in a public place where he has no jurisdiction about their immigration status. A mall cop can go to a restaurant and can harass another private citizen about their immigration status and threaten to call the police, but they will be acting as a private citizen NOT as an agent of the state. If an actual officer or (or agent of the state) were to have done the same thing that this actor did in the video he would have been in direct violation of the provisions of this law.
The institutional left would have you believe that the Arizona law suddenly made immigration illegal. In fact, it simply asserts that illegal immigration is illegal and agents of the state are empowered to enforce the federal law.
So taking note the blatant attempt by ABC to continue with a conscious effort to misinform the American public about the law, ABC and Quinones seemed to have forgotten the institutional-left-media talking point that undercover investigations are deceptive and wrong. Did you see how ABC edited this footage? How do we know that they portrayed the people in this video correctly? The media consistently touts the standard that conservatives who go undercover should release the full un-edited video clips of their investigations but apparently don’t hold the same standards to themselves. We consistently heard with ACORN and now with the Live Action videos that undercover investigation with a released edited tape is shoddy journalism and “deceptive editing.”
ABC News and John Quinones show the rank hypocrisy of the main stream media. They berate college-age girls for their undercover investigations and whine about edited videos and in the same week defy their own standards. ABC’s propaganda piece not only intentionally misinformed Americans about the provisions of the Arizona law but showed that liberals rarely think the standards that they apply to conservatives should apply to themselves.
Big Journalism
