December 8, 2005

Quote Unquote

One of my regular readers and commenters, who is usually in agreement with ths blog and is a very smart guy, has been on a personal crusade lately against Donna Locke, who I recently invited to begin posting here about immigration issues. His latest attack centers around a quote attributed to Locke. You can read the back-and-forth in the comments to this post. I urge you to read Locke's long reply. The quote is a fabrication - not by my reader, but by Jeffrey Gettleman, a reporter then writing for the Los Angeles Times who later went on to write fiction for the New York Times. Locke lays out the details. I have reproduced her response verbatim in the extended portion of this entry.

Donna wrote:

This will be long. Bear with me. Though some folks have made it a personal crusade to shut me up, their efforts often provide fresh opportunity for me to get information to the public. Such is the case today.

In 1999, an illegal-alien driver slammed into my daughter, injuring her and starting a long and almost unbelievable nightmare for my family. We were lucky: my daughter survived; many have not. I stepped up my involvement in the immigration-control movement, did a lot more research, and became a spokeswoman for that cause.

It wasn't something I particularly wanted to do, but I didn't see many other volunteers. I had been a Sixties activist in a number of causes, including environmental preservation and civil rights. As in other causes and movements, only a few spoke out publicly in the beginning, but eventually many others gained courage from the few and joined us.

I've been interviewed by a number of newspaper reporters. All of them knew their paper's bias and most wrote for it. In fact, a few reporters, knowing I'm a former reporter, have told me their editors cut, rewrite, or kill their stories in order to preserve the paper's bias/advocacy on immigration issues.

There's a definite media bias against us. Immigration control and reduction have been given short shrift or no shrift at all, especially in the big papers, though the balance has improved lately. The news media's practice of advocacy rather than journalism has hurt, possibly fatally damaged, our republic.

I'm leaving out some worthy mentions here, but the fairest, most professional reporters I've dealt with on the immigration issue were Rick Badie of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution and Monica Whitaker of The Tennessean. Badie writes a column now for his paper. I believe Whitaker is no longer with The Tennessean.

The worst "reporter" I've dealt with was Jeffrey Gettleman, when he worked for The Los(t) Angeles Times. Gettleman is the originator of the "quote" cited by Michael Chaney in his comment above. Gettleman attributed the quote to me in an Aug. 21, 2001, story he wrote for the L.A. paper. I never said it. He made it up. He fashioned those two sentences from what I said to him and made them sound the way he wanted them to sound. Anyone who knows me knows that is not even the way I talk. And that is confirmed by the unfailingly accurate quotes attributed to me in a number of AJC news stories at the same time, when, as usual, I minced no words. The AJC staked out an editorial position advocating driver's licenses for illegal aliens and opposed us on most every other front, but we did get some fair play there, once we broke down the door.

I was living in an Atlanta suburb, leading the Georgia Coalition for Immigration Reform, when Gettleman, who had moved to Atlanta as a bureau chief for his paper, called me for an interview and asked me for other sources for his story about immigration. The Los Angeles Times hasn't done a fair and balanced job on immigration reporting and, perhaps taking a cue from the California film industry, loves to play up Southern stereotypes. Jeffrey probably thought we would never see his story way over there in California. But we did. A Marietta, Ga., police officer and I immediately contacted the L.A. paper's editors and reader's rep and told them we had been misquoted. A media watchdog sent the paper and me a link to a published complaint about twisted reporting by Gettleman, a complaint by some public officials in Mississippi, I believe. I don't have that link anymore, but a quick Googling today turned up this.

The police officer demanded a retraction and an apology and was quoted in an AJC story ("Marietta officer says L.A. paper misquoted: Remarks about Mexican workers were another's" by Charles Yoo, Aug. 25, 2001) as saying he repeated complaints to Gettleman that business owners had made about day laborers, and Gettleman reported their words as the officer's. I knew the officer was telling the truth, because one of the business owners, an immigrant herself, had said the same things to me once.

For my part, I asked for a retraction and the publication of a letter to the editor denying the "quote" attributed to me. The Los Angeles Times blew us off -- no retraction, no correction, no LTE, no apology, no justice. I posted the chain of events on my Web site, sent the link to reporters, and wrote off The Los Angeles Times.

I sent Gettleman a very strong letter. He e-mailed me and wanted to take me to lunch. I didn't go.

Gettleman seems to be a very smart and energetic guy, but his behavior during his one-hour interview with me was a fascinating, even stupefying, study in unprofessionalism. At one point, he said, "You probably like high testosterone levels, don't you?" Answered with amazed silence, he said, "I mean sometimes . . . " Well, I wasn't going there. Not with a kid young enough to be my son anyway. I could only wonder where in Atlanta we might send young Gettleman for help with etiquette and hormone control.

Gettleman went on to write for The New York Times. Pause for laugh.

All the predictions I made to The AJC and to Gettleman have come true. Georgia now has many of the problems California has because of massive illegal immigration from all sending countries. Schools, hospitals, public services in general, are overwhelmed, and Georgians are losing jobs to cheap labor. Same here in my native Tennessee.

As for the "overwhelm" "quote" that I did not say but which was attributed to me: what I actually supplied to Gettleman and told him to explore were quotes attributed to Sam Zamarripa in two news stories. Zamarripa is now a Georgia state senator championing illegal aliens but was then and possibly still is chairman of the metro Atlanta Latin American Association. He was quoted in a March 6, 2000, AJC story by Maria Saporta ("Metro 'diversity tour' proves an eye-opener . . .") as saying to Lyndon Wade, the retiring executive director of the Atlanta Urban League, "Your song may be, 'We shall overcome' . . . our song is, 'We shall overwhelm.'" Zamarripa was quoted by The AJC on another occasion as saying, "We shall overwhelm," a slogan that has cropped up in what many call the Mexican reconquista movement.

A Feb. 6, 2000, story in The Rocky Mountain News quoted University of New Mexico professor Charles Truxillo as saying: "Republica del Norte," the Republic of the North, which would include the present U.S. states of California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, plus southern Colorado, along with several current Mexican states, is "an inevitability." The new "Hispanic homeland" should be brought into being "by any means necessary."

I began to see a pattern.

Former U.S. Rep. Esteban Torres, D-CA, while he was a member of Congress, said the following to a Latino crowd at a meeting of the Southwest Voter Registration Education Project in 1996: "We are a swing vote - the kind of swing vote that I've just described to you can cause governments to fall or to rise. This organization, its Southwest Research Institute, has been moving in this hemisphere . . . in Nicaragua - in El Salvador - in Mexico . . ." -- recorded on Voice of Citizens Together/American Patrol's videotape Immigration: Threatening the Bonds of Our Union, Part II.

I could supply many more examples of what I consider subversive, anti-American speech and action on the part of open-borders advocates, and it isn't restricted to Latinos. I've seen and heard it myself on recordings made undercover by off-duty law enforcement officers I know, law enforcement officers employed by a government that betrays them daily. Most of you simply don't know what is going on and you don't grasp that your tax dollars are funding it.

Juan Jose Pena, Hispanic activist and vice chairman of the Hispanic Roundtable, may have put "armed rebellion" on hold "because we just didn't have the firepower," but at this point I have to agree with Pena if he indeed said this: "I've studied lots of civilizations. The United States is just like any other empire. It's not going to live forever. Eventually it will break down because of the stresses." And the silence.