So now he is back, flacking a book. Harper Collins’ book page headlines, “Whether you were born in the U.S., just recently immigrated, are a Dreamer or undocumented citizen, we are all Americans.”
Obviously, he is still unclear on the concept of American citizenship, just as he was when Time chose him as the magazine’s illegal alien cover boy in 2012:
Jose the Filipino is certainly one of the media’s favorite illegal aliens, since he has no violent crimes to cover up (that we know of), only the ubiquitous job and benefits theft.
Harper Collins also shows a book tour scheduled at least through the end of September, so there is an opportunity for ICE to easily catch and deport him, an action that would be a great service for the nation.
The New York Times apparently remains fond of Vargas, as shown by its review of the book:
Not every day that a writer who happens to be undocumented gets a review in the @nytimesarts section of @nytimes #DearAmerica pic.twitter.com/roC50Bp4rV
— Jose Antonio Vargas (@joseiswriting) September 20, 2018
Here’s that review, reprinted elsewhere:
]]>Living the American Dream — in Hiding, New York Times, September 19, 2018
Jose Antonio Vargas comes from a family of gamblers, and in his new book, “Dear America: Notes of an Undocumented Citizen,” he’s upping the ante — or maybe, given the current executive’s predilection for travel bans and family separations, he’s going all in. Vargas recalls the enormous wager his family made 25 years ago, when his mother brought him to Ninoy Aquino International Airport in Manila and put him on a flight to California. He was 12 years old, and he would go to America first. Mama, as he calls her throughout his memoir, promised to follow.
Twenty-five years later, Mama is still in the Philippines, and Jose is still in the United States — no longer based in Mountain View, Calif., where he was sent to live with his maternal grandparents, but traveling around the country as an activist filmmaker and a writer, without a fixed address where he might be apprehended.
In 2011, he was a young journalist with an enviable résumé when he published an essay in The New York Times Magazine that revealed his undocumented status. Immigration lawyers warned him against going public; one called it “legal suicide.” In “Dear America,” Vargas writes that talking to lawyers “made me feel like I was carrying an incurable disease.”
Filipinos living in the United States have a Tagalog term for the undocumented immigrants who go to their churches, live in their communities or reside in their homes: tago ng tago, “hiding and hiding” — T.N.T. for short, like a secret waiting to explode. Vargas’s grandparents, both of them naturalized citizens, expected him to keep hiding until he didn’t have to. The plan was for Jose to find under-the-table work, like cleaning bathrooms at the flea market, so he could save enough money to pay an American woman to marry him. Maybe, his grandmother hoped, he wouldn’t even need to pay anyone, because he would fall in love.
But he wasn’t about to toil in the shadows to marry an American woman; Vargas is gay, and he’s also extremely, exuberantly ambitious. The constant dissembling was unbearable, he explains; he feared losing sight of who he was.
Vargas came out as gay when he was 16. Coming out as undocumented took longer. He wanted to dream big, even when his family was telling him that a life out in the open was not only fanciful but dangerous. “You are not supposed to be here,” his grandfather would remind him.
“The dream that Mama, Lolo and Lola had for me was dictated by their own realities, by their own sense of limitations,” he writes, using the Tagalog words for grandpa and grandma. “The America they dreamed for me was not the America I was creating for myself.”
The moments when Vargas describes how profoundly alienated he feels from his own family are the most candid and crushing parts of the book. He admits that he felt much closer to what he calls his “white family” — the caring grown-ups who mentored him in high school; the seasoned journalists who gave him career advice; the generous benefactors who offered him material support — than to the blood relatives who made extraordinary sacrifices in order to bring him to the United States. As a teenager, he could barely bring himself to call Mama in the Philippines. “I couldn’t talk to my own mother while I was collecting mother figures,” he says, in one ruthlessly honest line.
His grandmother and grandfather raised him, but they couldn’t see him. They warned him against taking up too much space, telling their cub-reporter grandson he was “getting fancy now.” In 2008, when Vargas was cited as part of a team for The Washington Post that won a Pulitzer Prize, his grandmother called to say how worried she was. “What will happen if people find out?” she asked.
“Dear America” covers some of the same ground as Vargas’s essay for The Times Magazine, as well as his 2013 film, “Documented.” He details the fake papers his grandfather purchased for $4,500. He recalls how the local library enabled his teenage self to become a connoisseur of ’90s pop culture on the cheap. (What truly mystified him were the cartoons in The New Yorker: “Were they supposed to be funny?”) He briefly recounts the colonial history of the Philippines, first under the Spanish, then under the Americans, as well as the stark betrayal of the 1946 Rescission Act, which reneged on the American promise to offer citizenship and veterans’ benefits to Filipino soldiers who fought on behalf of the United States in World War II. (Continues)
She has written two books critical of the media: Stonewalled: [...]]]>
She has written two books critical of the media: Stonewalled: My Fight for Truth Against the Forces of Obstruction, Intimidation, and Harassment in Obama’s Washington (2014) and more recently The Smear: How Shady Political Operatives and Fake News Control What You See, What You Think, and How You Vote (2017).
Attkisson also hosts a weekly public affairs program Full Measure which is shown on Sinclair stations and can also be seen on its Youtube channel.
Illegal alien crime is a topic that has been investigated on Full Measure.
So she is a good person to do a 5-minute Prager University explanation of why we hate the media (it’s rotten) and how it got to be so mistrusted — nearly two-thirds of Americans believe the press is full of fake news according to a Harvard-Harris poll published last spring.
]]>WHY NO ONE TRUSTS THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA
by SHARYL ATTKISSON
TRANSCRIPT (November 6, 2017):
Trust in the media is at an all-time low—and for good reason.
We in the business of journalism have exempted ourselves from the normal rules that used to govern us, and so the most egregious kinds of reporting errors are becoming more common. Formerly well-respected news organizations and experienced national reporters are making the sorts of mistakes that wouldn’t be tolerated in journalism school.
When these mistakes are corrected at all, it’s with seemingly little regret. And the corrections never get anywhere near as much attention as the original salacious—but incorrect—narrative.
How did we get here?
I discuss that in detail in my book, The Smear.
Here are three factors:
First, firewalls that once strictly separated news from opinion have been replaced by hopelessly blurred lines. Once-forbidden practices, such as editorializing within straight news reports and the inclusion of opinions as if fact, are not only tolerated—they’re encouraged. The result: It’s never been harder for Americans to separate news that’s real from news that’s not.
Example: May 14, 2016, ten days after Donald Trump became the Republican presidential nominee, the New York Times published a blockbuster article titled, “Crossing the Line: How Donald Trump Behaved with Women in Private.” The story’s authors, Michael Barbaro and Megan Twohey, interviewed Rowanne Lane, an ex-girlfriend of Trump’s. Her quotes made Trump sound, at best, like a jerk, and at worst, like a predator.
The reporters went so far as to provide their own quotes for the story, presenting their personal commentary as if it were established fact, writing, “This is the public treatment of some women by Mr. Trump. . . degrading, impersonal, performed.”
The problem is, the reporting wasn’t true—according to Trump’s supposed victim. Once the story was published, she publicly accused the Times of misleading her, writing a “hit piece” against Trump and putting a “negative connotation” on what—she said—was “not…a negative experience.”
No matter where you stand, this was a huge development in terms of journalism: the main source behind front-page national news discredited the entire premise of the story. Free Courses for Free Minds .com You’d expect something like that to rock the whole news organization and prompt investigations, a retraction, and re-examination of policies. Yet, I can find no record of any of that. The Times and their reporters never even apologized or printed a correction.
Second, though we may personally like or dislike a politician, as journalists we’re obligated to treat them the same. Too often, that’s not the case.
For example: In May 2008, then-presidential candidate Barack Obama said he had visited 57 states. Since there are only 50 states, everyone knew what he meant. He meant to say was that he had visited 47 states. The remark, nothing more than a verbal gaffe, drew little attention. And it didn’t deserve more. But when Sarah Palin made a comparable gaffe, saying, “We’ve got to stand with our North Korean allies,” she was relentlessly ridiculed and mocked in the media even though everyone knew she meant to say “South Korean allies.”
Third, too many of us have allowed ourselves to become tools of politicians and spin-meisters— often in order to get something in return. I call this “transactional journalism.”
Example: Emails show in July 2009, The Atlantic reporter Marc Ambinder was promised a scoop. He’d get an advanced copy of a speech by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton— but only if he followed certain conditions, as privately dictated by Clinton aide Philippe Reines.
Reines emailed Ambinder precise instructions, including: “Describe Clinton’s voice as ‘muscular’” and “Don’t say you were blackmailed,” by which Clinton aide Reines obviously meant, “Don’t reveal our arrangement.” “Got it,” replied Ambinder.
His resulting article reads in part: “When you think of President Obama’s foreign policy, think of Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. That’s the message behind a muscular speech that Clinton is set to deliver today.”
That Ambinder, then considered a serious journalist, would allegedly violate basic ethics for such a minor story speaks volumes about the state of today’s news media. For the record, Ambinder defended himself by saying that he found Clinton’s speech to be muscular, so the adjective was appropriate.
I think most Americans would like to believe their news is factual, well researched, and untainted by a reporter’s opinion. To put it another way, they want their news straight up. But too often now, that’s not what they’re getting, and they know it.
I’m frequently asked, “Can the news be fixed?” The answer is yes…but the first step to fixing a problem is admitting that we have one.
Until we do that, nothing can change.
I’m Sharyl Attkisson for Prager University
It was terrible news for all inquiring minds when CBS journalist Bob Simon was killed Wednesday in a New York City car crash. At a time when much of the media spews liberal propaganda rather than provide facts about a complex world, Simon enlightened the public with a gentle story-teller’s hand. His death is a real loss and a reminder of what reporters are supposed to do.
One of my favorite pieces was his 2009 Sixty Minutes segment about the head of the Orthodox Christian Church, Patriarch Bartholomew, who was made to feel increasingly unwelcome in Muslim Istanbul. Much of early Christian history occurred in Turkey, and two million Orthodox lived there a century ago, but now, only 4,000 Orthodox faithful remain in the country following an expulsion of 1.5 million in 1923 and the 1955 anti-Christian riots in Istanbul that convinced 150,000 to leave.
Simon presented an honest picture of how tough life is for Christians in Muslim nations, something not often seen on the broadcast networks.
Another fine film was Simon’s 35-minute documentary about the late athlete Lou Zamperini on the occasion of the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano Japan, where the younger Zamperini was held as a prisoner of war in WWII. A month ago, I read Laura Hillenbrand’s biography of the veteran, Unbroken, A World War II Story of Survival, Resilience, and Redemption, and the Simon film was a worthy portrayal of Zamperini’s amazing life. I felt far more trusting of the Bob Simon depiction rather than Anjelina Jolie’s Hollywood film, which I haven’t seen.
And thanks to the internet, here is that 1998 film, The Great Zamperini:
Finally, the Daily Mail reports that the diverse driver of the culpable vehicle had a bad driving record:
]]>Cab driver who had his license suspended nine times before he crashed and killed Bob Simon, Daily Mail, Feb 12, 2015
The cab driver in the crash which killed veteran CBS correspondent Bob Simon had his license suspended at least half a dozen times prior to the fatal accident and had two traffic convictions, the NYPD confirmed today.
Reshad Abdul Fedahi, 44, of Queens, New York, had multiple cleared suspensions and was driving on a probationary license.
The Taxi and Limousine Commission did not comment on the driver’s previous suspensions on Thursday but the agency earlier confirmed that Fedahi’s probationary license had been suspended pending the outcome of the investigation.
Holding a probationary license means that the driver has been behind the wheel for less than a year.
A preliminary investigation into the Manhattan crash which killed the 73-year-old also suggested that a combination of speed, an inexperienced driver and the fact the reporter wasn’t wearing a seatbelt could be responsible, according to police sources. [. . .]