Joe Arpaio

Both NBC and ABC's newscasts on Thursday highlighted outrage at the "accusations of abuse and bigotry" from "bully" sheriff Joe Arpaio.  Faced with new claims from Barack Obama's Justice Department, the two networks played up dramatic attacks from critics. [See video below. MP3 audio here.]

"Nightly News" anchor Brian Williams flatly declared, "Tonight, the U.S. Justice Department says the sheriff and his deputies have gone too far. They have been systematically been violating the constitutional rights of Latinos." ABC's "World News" uncritically featured one of Arpaio's prisoners who hyperbolically insisted, "The food we eat is disgusting. It's more like a concentration camp than anything else."

Leftist radio talker Mike Malloy is really obsessed with executing conservatives. When the Navy SEALs shot Osama bin Laden, he asked when they would "drop in on George Bush," since he "was responsible for a lot more death, innocent death, than bin Laden."  

On Tuesday, Malloy wished death on Thanksgiving for Florida Gov. Rick Scott. "And then this miserable son of a bitch has the audacity to go to a homeless shelter? It's a wonder somebody didn't hold his head down in a vat of turkey gravy until he stopped squiggling! He goes to a homeless shelter and talks about how he cares...? Mmm-hmm!"

UPDATE, 6:20 p.m. ET: AP now has a 5:28 p.m. item on the bounty. It's enough to make you wonder if the item below shamed the wire service into covering it. 

(original post) 

A look at the Associated Press's raw national feed (saved and stored here at about 1:30 p.m. ET for future reference) informs us that the wire service considers the following items worthy of at least some countrywide attention:

• We're No. 1! UGA tops party schools ranking
• Lindsay Lohan released from jail, goes to rehab
• (Football Player Albert) Haynesworth again doesn't pass conditioning test
• Vuvuzelas silenced for basketball worlds

The fact that the sheriff of Maricopa County, Arizona has had a $1 million bounty placed on his head by a Mexican drug cartel, an offer that is being treated as a credible threat? Sorry, that doesn't make the cut. An AP search on Sheriff Joe Arpaio's last name confirms it:

One reason to hope that the Big 3 networks continue to muddle through their awful evening news ratings and somehow hang around is that there's an alternative out there that would be much worse.

If any of the networks ever considered outsourcing their nightly newscasts to the Associated Press, the likely result could be bad enough to make some long for the (relatively) good old days of Brian, Diane, and Katie.

An object example of the AP's pathetically one-sided, biased and completely not-transparent video reporting came last Tuesday when it covered the Department of Justice's lawsuit against Arizona's illegal immigration enforcement measure. The 1070 law tells police to verify citizenship status in "contact" situations (e.g., traffic stops and other routine matters) if they have a "reasonable suspicion" that the person or persons involved aren't here legally.

AP's go-to "expert" acts as if it's a given that the United States government has decided that being here illegally ("without documentation") isn't a crime. Seriously. During the 104-second report (first go here, then type "Arizona immigration" in the search bar near the bottom, and select "Fed. Suing to Block Ariz. Immigration Law"), AP reporter Brian Thomas interviewed no one who defended the law's constitutionality.

Here's the transcript:

Liberal political pundits frequently remind Americans that words matter, which makes broadcast network reporters' coverage of Arizona's new crack down on illegal immigrants so appalling.  

Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer signed a law on April 23 that would make it a misdemeanor for immigrants to not carry documentation proving they are in the country legally. The bill gave state law enforcement the power to determine the immigration status of any person during "any lawful contact." Amid allegations that this law would lead to "racial profiling," Brewer later amended it to allow law enforcement to only check the immigration status of those involved in a "lawful stop, detention or arrest."

Reporters on ABC, NBC and CBS misled the American people about the law by calling it "anti-immigration" twice as often as correctly identifying the law as "anti-illegal immigration" and reporting, as ABC's Bill Weir did on the April 24 "Good Morning America, "Police [in Arizona] now have the power to stop anyone and make them prove they are legal."

ABC's weekend coverage of a tough immigration bill in Arizona focused mostly on the anger and outrage against it, minimizing supporters of the legislation. Talking to Sheriff Joe Arpaio, a fierce critic of illegals, Good Morning America co-host Bill Weir on Sunday berated, "But with this new law, will you ramp it up?...Will you grab people on street corners? I mean, what will you do with this new law?" [Audio available here.]

He also challenged Arpaio about his own fight against illegal immigration and derided, "...How is it possible to enforce these sorts of laws without sweeping up innocent citizens in the process?"

NBC's Matt Lauer, on Monday's Today show, confronted Maricopa County, Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio with a cartoon that depicted a man being arrested for buying nachos, as the Today co-anchor pressed Arpaio about that state's enforcement of illegal immigration laws: "Are you worried that it affects the image of your state?" Throughout the interview Lauer peppered the sheriff with questions about "racial profiling" and "civil rights violations" and questioned if the new policy will "distract law enforcement" and "take valuable resources away from cracking down on more serious crimes." [audio available here]

The following is a complete transcript of the segment at it was aired on the April 26 Today show:

Geraldo Rivera told a Latino Congressman Saturday that he might get stopped on the streets of Phoenix by Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio as a result of the new anti-immigration law signed by Arizona Governor Jan Brewer the previous day.

Discussing the newly-passed legislation with guests Arpaio and Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.) on "Geraldo at Large," the host ungraciously started the segment by asking, "Sheriff, how do you define reasonable suspicion? Is it like obscenity that you don't exactly know how to define it but you know it when you see it?"

Arpaio responded, "[D]uring the course of the duties of law enforcement, my deputies, if someone doesn't have a license, doesn't speak English, ten guys stashed in back of a van, I think that's reasonable action or probable cause to take action."

Moments later, Rivera quipped, "Congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart, let me just warn you, maybe if you were walking around the streets of Phoenix, Sheriff Joe might stop you. You look sort of Latino, we're not sure even though you have a storied family background" (video follows with transcript, hat-tips to @Cubachi and The Right Scoop):  

On Friday's Situation Room, CNN's Suzanne Malveaux omitted the pro-illegal immigration activism of guest Isabel Garcia. Malveaux only referenced how her guest was "legal defender of Pima County, Arizona" and that she was "also co-chair of a Tucson-based human rights group." She also omitted how Garcia participated in the beating and decapitation of a pinata effigy of Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio.

The CNN correspondent, filling-in for anchor Wolf Blitzer, brought on the legal defender five minutes into the 5 pm Eastern hour to discuss how Arizona Governor Jan Brewer had signed a strong anti-illegal immigration bill into law less than an hour earlier. After introducing Garcia without mentioning the name of her organization,  ("The Human Rights Coalition," whose website features a logo incorporating the southwestern states into Mexico; a CNN graphic called it the "Coalition for Human Rights"), Malveaux first asked her, "The governor...said...she's not going to tolerate racial profiling....She's not going to let police officers pull somebody over because [of] the color of their skin or how they look. Do you believe the governor?"

On Monday’s Nightline, co-host Martin Bashir conducted a one-sided, hostile profile of Sheriff Joe Arpaio’s "brutal regime" and attacked his crackdown on illegal immigration as "racial profiling." The 11 minute investigation of the Maricopa County law enforcement official was almost totally negative. [Audio available here.]

After the Arizona sheriff asserted that his critics don’t like him because they oppose immigration enforcement, Bashir opined, "They don't like it because stopping people on the streets because they look Hispanic is racial profiling." In an interview with Newsmax, Arpaio claimed, "We've arrested and detained over 33,000 illegal aliens, 25 percent of the whole country..."

But rather than focus on successes, Bashir complained about the sheriff’s methods: "You're basically using minor misdemeanors, minor mistakes, perhaps speeding, as an excuse to then pick these individuals up?" The Nightline co-host aggressively focused on allegations of abuse. After bringing up claims of brutality and a botched prostitution ring, Bashir derided, "Doesn’t your brutal regime lead to brutality by your staff?"

CNN featured pro-illegal immigration activist Isabel Garcia of Tucson, Arizona on two programs on Wednesday night, and inadvertently caught her giving inconsistent answers regarding a 2008 protest where she participated in the beating and decapitation of a pinata effigy of Sheriff Joe Arpaio of Maricopa County, Arizona [audio clips from programs available here].

Correspondent Soledad O’Brien featured Garcia in the first segment of her ‘Latino in America’ miniseries at 9 pm Eastern, where she was labeled as an “unapologetic champion of people many Americans love to hate- illegal immigrants.” After detailing her involvement with a high-profile deportation case, O’Brien stated that Garcia had “nothing to do with creating the pinata and only picked it up to defuse” the anti-Arpaio protest. The CNN correspondent cast a sympathetic light on the activist by noting how she has apparently received death threats for her work.

As Mike Bates documented on Monday night, CNN’s Rick Sanchez likened Maricopa County, Arizona Sheriff Joe Arpaio to the segregationist “Bull” Connor during an interview on Monday’s Newsroom: “Like Bull Connor in 1960s, you’re going to sit there and tell the feds, you don’t care what they say, you’re going to do it your way and you're going to do it when you want to do it?” However, earlier in the segment, Sanchez also hinted that the sheriff was acting like a Nazi in his operations against illegal immigrants: “There are twenty-five years of laws and standards used by police departments where they’re real careful about probable cause, so that we don’t create a Gestapo environment in this country” [audio of both the Gestapo reference and the “Bull Connor” label available here; video at right].

The anchor first accused Arpaio of arresting people at random in his immigration raids: “What about the other people that- who you interfered in their lives simply while you were looking for someone else?” When the sheriff denied that he had, that “the others that were illegal, we put them in jail because they have committed other crimes,” Sanchez made the Nazi reference:

On his segment of today's CNN Newsroom, anchor Rick Sanchez went for the hat trick, likening Maricopa County Sheriff Joe Arpaio to the infamous Theophilus “Bull” Connor, Birmingham, Alabama’s late segregationist police commissioner who ruthlessly used police attack dogs and fire hoses to thwart 1963 civil rights demonstrators, no fewer than three times.

[SEE also Matt Balan's related post, with video.]

Sanchez prefaced his interview with the Arizona sheriff:

Well, perhaps not since Bull Connor whose aggressive police tactics against blacks in the South sparked civil rights legislation in 1964 has our country seen a showdown like the one going on right now between Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio and Washington, as in the feds.