Against Professionalism: What Motivates Open Borders Reporters?

By Nicholas Stix
February 21, 2009

In recent days, I’ve spent quite a bit of time reading the San Antonio Express- News. The San Antonio Immigration/Narcoterror News would be a better name. In spite of its editors’ best efforts at diluting the bad news with more upbeat stories, say about American sailors arrested for murder and attempted murder in Tijuana, or the Mexico City police’s success at corralling three outlaw bulls, the news is overwhelmed with constant murders by drug gangs south of the border, and illegal immigration stories from El Norte. And yet, many of the Express News’ staff reporters and AP reporters whose stories run in the paper do everything imaginable to misrepresent the news and help the cause of amnesty and open borders. What makes Open Borders Lobby (OBL) journalists tick? Since we’ll never get the truth out of these people, I ruminated on their possible motivations.

• In-group moral preening: As a number of people have said—I’m not sure who coined the phrase—“Moral superiority is the cocaine of the 21st century.” Ian Jobling posits that educated, upper-class people today obsessively play a game of “competitive altruism.” (See Part II here.) Although most of them haven’t an altruistic bone in their body, each must constantly show his fellow class members that he is more altruistic than they are, in terms of supporting (in this case) criminal, foreign invaders. This is a bipartisan game;

• In-group, personal employment practices: A great many MSM journalists, as well as their friends and relations, are members of that criminal class which has enriched itself at the expense of the American working-class, by engaging in ongoing, felonious conspiracies to break America’s immigration, labor, and tax laws, through hiring illegal aliens (whom they often abuse horribly). Like (1) above, these felons’ support for illegal aliens is merely an expression of class solidarity with their like, and class hatred towards the American working class;

• Loyalty towards Mexico: Many see themselves, regardless of their nationality or ethnicity, as enemies of the United States of America, and allies of the United States of Mexico, and thus seek to do anything in their power to harm the former, and to aid and abet the latter. Never mind that open borders, far from helping Mexico, would likely destroy both countries through the expansion of gangs and narcoterrorism;

• Naked fear: They are scared of doing their jobs. Many OBL journalists have surely been threatened by gangsters of different types—coyotes, narcoterrorists, etc.—that if they do their job, the gangsters will kill them. And given the gangsters’ wholesale slaughter, their threats carry weight. And yet, this explanation, while perhaps true for some few journalists, is inadequate to the OBL journalism phenomenon, because the reporters were already sympathetic to the monsters, before having encountered them. The “naked fear” explanation would have validity regarding reporters who opposed open borders and narcoterror, yet reported in a manner sympathetic to both, after being threatened. The problem is that the MSM typically refuse to hire such people, or get rid of them, once they reveal their respect for America’s laws and sovereignty [P.S. May 19, 2014: Actually, journalism schools exist to weed out those who are patriots, honest journalists, and who support morality.];

• Fascism: While most MSM reporters today conceive of themselves as socialists, communists, and/or racial/ethnic supremacists, many are also fascists. I realize that they would scream, were I to say this to their face, that they are “anti-fascists!” So, let me explain. While the Soviet Communist Party imposed the use of the term “fascism” as a synonym for Nazism, fascism was an Italian movement characterized by corporatism, a government-directed economy, a strongman dictator and violence. There is a natural fascism to which many people, and most leftists, are prone. It entails the glorification of violence, and of personality cults deifying the strong man. Thereby can leftists engage in vicarious aggression, supporting blood-curdling violence, using the pretext that they merely support “justice,” unlike the “fascists” whom they hate, and whom they assert support violence, for its own sake. (Unlike Nazism, fascism was not racist. Given that the Left has over the past 40-50 years embraced racism, and combined it with socialism/communism, their movement is now the closest thing to Hitler’s Nazism.)

• Bribery: In any locale in which gangsters have taken over, some will buy themselves scribes. In his biography, Royko: A Life in Print, lifelong Chicago newspaperman Richard Ciccone recounts that during Prohibition, some Chicago newspapermen took regular bribes, in the form of cash and free speakeasy hooch from Al Capone and other gangland bosses, in exchange for giving the bosses favorable press. MSM OBL journalists are unelected politicians. It beggars belief to assume that none is on the take;

• Excitement: Being on the front lines, whether as a soldier, policeman, fireman or reporter can bring a rush of adrenalin as intense as any from drugs or strong drink. Closeness to death makes one feel more alive, especially in the case of the sort of privileged, pampered folks who today dominate the news media. In Richard Brooks’ 1966 movie, The Professionals, a story about what happens when men go to Mexico, one of the four titular mercenaries (Burt Lancaster) muses about what originally drew him to Mexico from the other side of the Rio Grande, years before. From the El Paso side of the river, he had witnessed the opening salvos of the Pancho Villa-led Mexican Revolution. It was the excitement of pistols blazing. Now, he is no more so easily excited, and the revolutionaries have turned into bandits. He muses, “Maybe there's only been one revolution since the beginning – the good guys versus the bad guys. The question is – who are the good guys?”

(The Professionals , which inspired Sam Peckinpah’s masterpiece, The Wild Bunch , is a brilliant meditation on virtue, corruption, revolution … and professionalism. Between and sometimes during episodes in which the mercenaries and their erstwhile comrades, the bandits, are killing each other, they muse and debate on the nature of revolution. That I do not list the best arguments in support of revolution from the picture is because they are beyond the ken, intellectually and morally, of MSM OBL journalists, and thus irrelevant to this essay.)

In a country as thoroughly corrupt as Mexico, it may be impossible to distinguish the good guys from the bad guys, but America is not as far gone… yet. What sort of maniac would want to deliberately turn America into a place where you can’t distinguish the good guys from the bad guys?
 

[Afterword: I wrote this on February 21, 2009, and then put it aside. It was then buried in the manuscripts and crashes that followed. I just remembered it, having no idea that I’d written it so long ago.]