November 27, 2003 -- Joseph Dunn, a Democrat senator from California, reacting to a book by some flaming leftist California academic, is part of a movement to pay reparations for a 1930’s mass deportation of California Latinos to Mexico.  A class action lawsuit has been filed on behalf of those expatriated against their will, and on behalf of their survivors.

The PBS News Hour segment on this subject showed trainloads of Mexican nationals and Latino-American citizens being put on trains and locked inside until they crossed the border into Mexico.  The segment narrator expressly pointed out that federal agents were involved, but was distinctly indistinct as to the time period.  We think we know why, and the reason is undeniable proof of the Oregon Magazine contention that from Ken Burns’ Congress to the News Hour, PBS programming is a rape of history, a generic journalistic ripoff and a source of misinformation of such dimensions that all public support for the network should cease immediately.

Our Oregon big media is, of course, a full partner in this effort.  A few years back, one of the top managers at the state’s largest newspaper, the Oregonian, headed a team that did a series about the “plight” of the Hispanic agricultural workers hereabouts.  That team won a Pulitzer for that series.  When that Oregonian executive visited my cabin on a small stream west of Portland, I told him (he edited the series) that the Pulitzer award proved my contention about the work.  It was pure bias, and full of misinformation via factual omission. 

So was this PBS News Hour segment.  I can explain why in two sentences.  (Remember, this mass deportation of Latinos took place during the 1930's, a period known as the Great Depression.) Are you ready?  Who was the president of the United States from 1932 until his death late in WWII?  Which party controlled the congress during most of the Great Depression?

The News Hour didn’t mention those minor items.  Had it been a Republican president and congress, you can bet your last dollar that this report would have trumpeted that.  But, apparently this newly discovered incident took place during a difficult period for modern Democrats. It wasn’t, apparently, Republicans who dealt these cards.  It must have been the great Democrat god, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who sent out those federal agents to take illegals, legal residents and even native-born American Latinos from their homes, and stuffed them on those southbound trains.  Franklin Delano Roosevelt, folks.  The same Franklin Delano Roosevelt who put all those West Coast Japanese citizens in American concentration camps. 

It is for this reason that I constantly remind our readers that when they contribute time or money to public broadcasting, they are subsidizing leftist propaganda.  It is why I tell our readers that if they vote for liberal politicians like Oregon’s Ron Wyden (who created and heads a congressional organization to promote public broadcasting!), they are forcing themselves and their children to fork out direct taxpayer contributions, or to subsidize tax-free foundation donations, in support of this propaganda.

Stop doing it, people.  Stop financing their lies.  Send them no money, give them no time and get rid of the politicians in your state who stand foursquare for reporting that can be most generously described as outright crap.

FDR, folks. George Bush is responsible for corporate corruption and a recession that were generated during the Clinton Administration, but FDR isn't even mentioned in a report about a racist mass deportation that seemingly took place just after he became president!!

FDR, folks. The Thanksgiving Day edition of the News hour (with an Hispanic substitute host by the name of Ray Suarez!) didn't think that part was important.  As I pointed out in a recent response to an essay on the history of racism in Oregon that ran in the Portland Tribune, by not identifying who did the deed, you cast a cloak of guilt over people who don't deserve it.  

For black (and who knows how many Latino) voters who have never been told about the true roots of American racism, and whose votes are critical to the liberal Democrat retaking of the White House and congress in 2004, it is a default cloak of guilt cast over Republicans -- the very party who first stood with blacks, and defended them.  The party that fought to keep the Clinton Administration from sending Elian Gonzales back to Cuba. The same party whose Hispanic judicial nominee was recently filibustered out of a job by liberal Senate Democrats, and whose current black female judicial nominee is suffering the same treatment.

It's all part of the same, ancient liberal lie -- the lie of omission about that party's actual history.  A PBS (Oregon affiliate) pledge break is on as I write this.  The woman on the screen just said, "We take the time to do it right."  Is she a liar, or just a fool?  Out of a desire for charity, I'll take the latter choice. 

The net result is the same.  Bad jourrnalism, bad history and bad news for America..

(LL)

© 2003 Oregon Magazine