Chandra Levy

Correction: My initial post incorrectly conveyed that Chandra Levy was an intern for then-Rep. Gary Condit (D-Calif.). She was in fact an intern for the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

"Salvadoran Immigrant Ingmar Guandique Found Guilty of Murdering D.C. Intern Chandra Levy [12:45 p.m. ET]"

That was the breaking news headline that was blasted to my inbox from ABCNews.com regarding today's murder conviction of the suspect in the 2001 murder of federal government intern Chandra Levy.

In the Associated Press story by Matthew Barakat at the ABCNews.com website, there is no mention of the fact that Guandique is an illegal immigrant nor of the fact that he is involved in the ruthless gang Mara Salvatrucha, more commonly known as MS-13. This despite the fact that numerous news reports during Guandique's trial noted that he often wore turtleneck shirts in the courtroom to hide his gang tattoo.

You can clearly see that gang tattoo in an April 2009 file photo ABCNews.com included in their breaking news story.

See screencap below page break:

You would think that in the midst of the liberal media's fight to rip Arizona's Immigration Law, that the phrase ‘illegal immigrant' would be fairly easy to use in an appropriate manner.  Yet that is seemingly only the case when the phrase is used to cast common-sense immigration enforcement as discriminatory.  But when it comes to a story that could shed light on why enforcement is a necessity for the safety and security of a nation and its people, then the phrase - no matter how accurate - is quickly forgotten. 

One high profile case, the murder of Chandra Levy, highlights this fact.  It has been quite some time (over a year) since Ingmar Guandique was charged with Levy's murder, and much longer since he was identified as being an illegal immigrant from El Salvador. 

And while Guandique's illegal status isn't necessarily news to those having actually followed the case, you would think it was still an unproven fact based on media reports past and present. 

As a recent update reveals, attorney's working on behalf of Guandique argued that he would not get a fair trial in Washington, though a judge has now determined that the trial will indeed stay in DC.  Coinciding with this news, is the recent release of a book covering the case entitled, Finding Chandra. With these updates, one has to wonder how far the media has come in their willingness to report the truth.  How far have they come since Michelle Malkin noted a perfect record of going 115 for 115 in reports failing to mention the suspect's illegal status back in 2002?  As it turns out, not far at all...

CBS, CNN, FNC and the AP on Tuesday all failed to identify Ingmar Guandique, for whom an arrest warrant was issued for the 2001 murder of Chandra Levy, as an illegal alien. In a full story on the CBS Evening News, reporter Bob Orr described him simply as a “Salvadoran immigrant.” During CNN's Situation Room, Zain Verjee benignly called him “a laborer from El Salvador” and later, on Anderson Cooper 360, news reader Erica Hill referred to him as “a U.S. prison inmate from El Salvador.” (In between, the contrarian Lou Dobbs did identify Guandique as “a criminal illegal alien.”)

FNC's Bret Baier, on his 6 PM EST show, cited the new charge against “a Salvadoran immigrant” while multiple dispatches from the AP's Brian Westerly described Guandique as “an imprisoned Salvadoran immigrant.”

Wednesday's front page Washington Post article cited the murder suspect's immigration status, but not until the third paragraph: “Guandique, who entered the United States illegally in 2000 and had trouble scraping together a new life in Washington...” In contrast, the free Washington Examiner put the relevant fact in the lead of its story for the Wednesday paper:

Nearly eight years after the disappearance of congressional intern Chandra Levy dominated national headlines, D.C. authorities charged with murder an illegal immigrant who had been questioned in the early stages of the investigation.

When is a Democrat a "conservative?" When he's featured in a scandal story about adultery and murder.

The Washington Post is downplaying the party affiliation of disgraced former Democratic Rep. Gary Condit (D-Calif.), identifying him as a generic "congressman" or as a "conservative." The coy treatment is in marked contrast to the paper's frequent references to the GOP affiliation of Sen. Larry Craig and other disgraced Republicans.

In the first four installments of a 12-part series on the unsolved 2001 murder of D.C. intern Chandra Levy, the Post mentions the party affiliation of her boyfriend Condit only once. In three of the four articles, Condit is merely a "congressman." In fact, in the third installment, "A Private Matter," which ran July 15, Condit is described only as "a conservative congressman from a right-leaning agricultural district." The series was written by Post staff writers Sara Horwitz, Scott Higham and Sylvia Moreno.