“I never did give them hell. I just told the truth, and they thought it was hell.”
A “conservative” media watchdog group has come out with the breathless discovery that 92 percent of the television coverage of the Current Occupant’s immigration policy is negative.
The question that arises from that, of course, is how did anyone find enough good things to say about the administration’s border policy to add up to 8 percent that was positive?
The problem is that this is an analysis done with the assumption that all media coverage of a thing is deliberately positive or negative. Because the point of some people and some organizations is to slant information for or against a certain person or policy, they assume that that is everyone else’s point, too. The thought that most news coverage isn’t intended to be pro or con, but just to tell you what the hell is going on, doesn’t enter into their process.
This administration’s immigration policy is a war crime. Those carrying it out belong in the dock at some special tribunal in the Hague. (I was going to say they belong in Spandau Prison, but I looked it up. The Germans tore that down in 1987 after Rudolf Hess, the onetime Hitler aide who had been the only prisoner there for 20 years, died. Pity.)
Families seeking asylum at our border, as international law and common human decency allow, have been forcibly separated. Toddlers have appeared in immigration court with no adult, much less legal, representation. Children have been sexually, emotionally and physically abused. Parents and children have been coerced into signing paperwork they can’t read, pushed by false promises of reunification or threats of permanent separation. Children have been forced to take mood-altering medications.
It is possible that some of these reports are off the mark or exaggerated. The sources of the information in most cases include either the immigrant families or their lawyers. We won’t know for sure until Congress stands up and demands the truth. And that won’t happen unless the Democrats win at least the House in November.
Otherwise, all you will have to dig out the truth will be the shrinking news media.
•••
Francis Gibson, it is safe to say, knows very little about environmental activism.
Gibson, a Republican from Mapleton, is a member of the board of the new Utah Inland Port Authority and a member of the Utah House, where he serves as majority whip. The other day he said that the many environmental activists and watchdogs who turned out for the board’s first — and pleasantly open — meeting ought to get together and pick a single spokesbeing to pipe up at future meetings.
He is correct to suspect that there will be a lot of such piping up at all the board’s meetings. That’s because it seems clear the whole point of the port authority and its board is to take power away from Salt Lake City. And the reason to do that is so developers can skate over, under and around environmental concerns and rules that city officials would not ignore.
But Gibson is wrong if he thinks that all environmentalists think alike. Different groups have different priorities and concerns.
I learned that at a meeting of environmental activists many years ago, when the subject of wind power came up. The Sierra Club envoy was in favor of this promising carbon-free source of energy. The Audubon Society representative was not, seeing as how those giant windmills are a threat to some migrating birds.
They nearly came to blows before we changed the subject.
Get comfortable, Rep. Gibson. Some of your meetings are going to be very long.
gpyle@sltrib.com
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