Presswatch: Riverside Drive West
Corry, John
"Presswatch: Riverside Drive West" by John Corry Riverside Drive West It was Rodney King all over again, with a reminder of O.J. Simpson. An 8o-mile chase on California freeways ended when a truck carrying twenty-one...
...It could tilt the critical Latino vote in California toward Bill Clinton...
...In the media age, correspondents do not cover police stations or county courts...
...Moreover, if illegal Mexican immigrants are caught crossing the border with children, they are released in the United States and not returned to Mexico...
...There were no lawyers filing multimillion-dollar damage suits on Miss Asuna's behalf...
...The New York Times recently had two page-one stories about a young woman from Togo who had entered the United States illegally...
...An international incident was born with the resulting fifteen secJOHN CORRY is The American Spectator's senior correspondent...
...When the truck stopped, the occupants bolted, except for the driver and two passengers...
...it concluded with a plea for an investigation into the "pattern of attitudes and policies toward illegal immigrants...
...Only 13 percent said they had been treated poorly, and that figure was suspect...
...Only one deportee described a violent incident...
...Passengers in the truck threw beer cans at the pursuers...
...Surely someone should have told the Foreign Ministry to go stuff it...
...No one seemed upset, either, when the Mexican Foreign Ministry lodged its absurd complaint about the "flagrant violations of the human rights of Mexican citizens...
...How this will play out in an election year, ofcourse, is unknown...
...had deported...
...Meanwhile, the California beatingsmay have attracted enormous attention in both the United States and Mexico, but almost no attention was paid to a similar incident a few weeks later...
...A UPI story in the Washington Times reported on a survey of 456 Mexicans whom the U.S...
...The driver of the truck, Enrique Nunez Flores, suffered a hairline fracture of an elbow...
...The second story said she would be released, and that this was expected to set a precedent "that will influence the treatment of other women who say they are fleeing genital mutilation, a common rite in 26 African nations...
...Media coverage focused more on the big picture— incipient racism, police brutality, immigrants' rights—than it did on the actual incident, and someone has to pay...
...The killing of seventeen farm workers by Mexican police at a rally near Acapulco last year did not receive as much coverage as the California beatings...
...They drop in only for the really big story, and miss almost everything else...
...Videotape shot by a helicopter news crew caught two sheriff's deputies clubbing the driver of the truck and a passenger with nightsticks...
...Immigration disputes with Mexico get a free pass...
...They may then receive medical care, schooling for the children, and welfare benefits if they should have more babies...
...Then they hit them...
...Presumably, the two deputies will now be punished, although hopefully not because one was once associated with other deputies who swaggered, or becauseneither, at a time of high stress, spoke in English and not Spanish...
...The truck evaded a Border Patrol checkpoint...
...In other words, the Republicans did it, a recurring theme in the coverage...
...Subsequently, the Post ran a piece by veteran journalist Lou Cannon on an opinion page...
...The coverage, however, suggested otherwise...
...His companion and perhaps common-law wife, Alicia Soltero Vasquez (or Leticia Gonzalez, depending on which paper you read, and when you read it), required no immediate medical attention, although apparently she suffered bruises...
...Three days later, in a story from Mexico City, the Times reported that Jose Angel Pescador, the Mexican consul in Los Angeles, was encouraging "at least four Mexican-American and Hispanic grassroots organizations in California" to take their protests to the streets...
...An 8o-mile chase on California freeways ended when a truck carrying twenty-one illegal Mexican immigrants finally stopped...
...After leading the police on an 8o-mile chase during which he sideswiped other vehicles, while his passengers threw beer cans, Enrique Nunez Flores may be thought fortunate to have suffered only a fractured elbow...
...Department of State...
...This is not a good idea, but then again, immigration is not the media's strong point...
...A few days later, the Times disclosed that the deputies had yelled first at the illegal immigrants in English and not Spanish...
...Perkins wrote about that: After a 130-mile high-speed chase from southern Los Angeles County to Tijuana, Mexican police did not merely beat 16year-old Elizabeth Asuna into submission...
...The videotape was shown over and over on CNN, and it made all the evening news programs...
...Two sheriff's deputies from Riverside County then approached, while the news crew hovered overhead...
...Hypocrisy lay thick on the ground, along with intrusions into domestic politics...
...Mexico, it seems, found Pat Buchanan particularly offensive...
...48 June r 9 9 6 • The American Spectator which it covered the beatings, the New York Times said that the Mexican Ministry of Foreign Relations had sent a stiff letter to the U.S...
...When the camper frame on the truck became loosened, they threw chunks of that...
...The first Times story described the conditions under which she was being held in detention...
...Reporters and correspondents do not empathize with cops the way they once did...
...Anybody who has to live with people, who covers police stations or covers county courts, brought up that way, has to have a degree of humanity that people who do not have that exposure don't have...
...The Mexican government charged racism, while the White House expressed concern, and civil rights and immigration groups held demonstrations...
...Actually, they were lucky they only got clubbed...
...Surely someone should have demanded that he be deported...
...Grant now that the deputies acted improperly...
...As the Los Angeles Times and virtually every other California news organization reported, they had violated Riverside Sheriff's Department guidelines...
...He is right, and he appears to be one of the few journalists who cares about it...
...34 percent said the treatment had been "regular...
...The Times also reported that one of the deputies "once was associated" with a group of deputies "who adopted a swaggering attitude to make it clear they would not tolerate lawbreakers...
...Meanwhile, the driver of the truck sideswiped cars, presumably as a diversionary tactic...
...He blamed Pete Wilson, as well as Buchanan...
...In the same story in By the way, how does Mexico treat its illegals...
...It was unclear what happened to the other passenger—he wasn't on the videotape—although his lawyer said later that he also had been beaten...
...The survey, taken by the newspapers Reforma and El Norte, found that 51 percent of the deportees said immigration officials had given them "good" treatment...
...There was no "human chain" formed along the border to protest the girl's shooting...
...She said her group was "really sickened" by what it saw on the videotape...
...Perkins says there is a "double standard in U.S.-Mexico border policy...
...onds of videotape...
...Regular meant that someone had shouted at them or used disrespectful language...
...There is a double standard in journalistic practice, too...
...The Times noted that on the videotape, "neither deputy can be seen discharging pepper spray, and neither appears to display his baton as a warning to the suspects before striking them...
...She had fled Togo, she said, because she wanted to escape her tribe's custom of cutting off the genitals of young women...
...There were no indignant protests by high-ranking government officials in either Sacramento or Washington...
...It showed that the Mexicans offered no resistance when the deputies hit them...
...The letter expressed "indignation" over the California incident and the "flagrant violation of the human rights of Mexican citizens...
...The Washington Post uncovered Bobbi Murray of the Coalition for Humane Immigrants' Rights of Los Angeles...
...Cronkite, though, had it backwards...
...Meanwhile, the Boston Globe quoted Juan Jose Gutierrez of One Stop Immigration in Los Angeles, possibly an organization contacted by Mexican consul Pescador...
...No prominent news organization, columnist, or commentator seemed particularly upset when the Mexican consul in Los Angeles began calling for demonstrations...
...Gutierrez told the Globe that the people at a rally were showing "their disgust with the way politics has been played in the United States...
...Various police units then pursued it, reportedly at speeds up to ma miles an hour...
...04 The American Spectator • June r 9 9 6 49...
...The Times, of course, was lobbying, using its news columns to expand the concept of political asylum...
...It rounds up illegal immigrants from Central and South Americ and deports them as quickly as it can, whether they have children or not...
...It wants African women who say they fear genital mutilation to be treated the same as people fleeing a gulag...
...Republican rhetoric, apparently, had led to the beating of the Mexican driver and his passenger...
...only then did they say, "Manos aqui" — Spanish for "hands here...
...As Cannon saw it, they "often have been depicted in political campaigns as alien invading hordes who are a menace to the United States...
...On the other hand, you never know...
...But we're not inordinately surprised," she added, "because we've been concerned for a long time that this inflamed election year rhetoric of bashing immigrants and singling them out as an enemy creates an atmosphere that gives license to this sort of stuff...
...At the same time, it does adopt causes...
...At the Radio-TV Correspondents dinner in March, Marc Morano, Rush Limbaugh's man in Washington, asked Walter Cronkite to comment on CBS correspondent Bernard Goldberg's charge that the media had a liberal bias...
...The Times also reported that the IPR, Mexico's long dominant political party, said in a statement that the beatings showed "how far racist and xenophobic attitudes have reached in the United States as a result of the election campaign...
...The press is most comfortable looking in only one direction...
...It could also touch off an Anglo backlash that would favor Bob Dole...
...Mexico treats its own illegal immigrants quite differently...
...PRESSWATCH by John Corry Riverside Drive West It was Rodney King all over again, with a reminder of O.J...
...Joseph Perkins, a columnist for the San Diego Union-Tribune, calls this "the dirty little secret that the Mexican government tries to keep quiet...
...Truck driver Flores, openly encouraged by the Mexican government, filed a suit against Riverside County for more than $10 million, alleging that the deputies "recklessly, intentionally and wantonly beat him...
...At the same time, some things simply had to be reported...
...Consider the provocations...
...Everybody knows that there is a liberal, that there is a heavy liberal persuasion among correspondents," Cronkite replied...
...They shot the American teen in the back before taking her into custody...
...It began with a sensible warning about relying on the videotape to determine what really happened...
...The United States treats Mexican illegals quite well...
...The suit should be laughed out of court, but it won't be...
...An audio tape made by the California Highway Patrol had revealed that the deputies shouted "Get down" at the driver and the two passengers...
...The story also said that the young woman's lawyer credited the Times with winning her release...
...Cries of outrage immediately followed...
...One of them is now immigration...
...If the correspondents hung around more, their humanity would be widened considerably, and they would be more sympathetic to all the rest of us, even to, or perhaps especially to, the police...
...Police stations and county courts deal with bad people who make good people miserable...
Vol. 29 • June 1996 • No. 6
