Julia Preston

The New York Times continued its push for immigration "reform" in Thursday's edition. The front of the National section included a page-width photo of "tens of thousands of immigrants, Latinos, union members, gay rights and other advocates" who rallied at the Capitol Wednesday.

Reporters Julia Preston and Ashley Parker, among the most slanted on the paper's staff, used even higher figures for the march while covering the so-called Group of 8's deal on an immigration amnesty bill, "Bipartisan Senators’ Group Reaches Deal on Immigration Bill." The phrasing was awkward, as vagueness (there are no official crowd estimates) grasped for specificity: "several tens of thousands of immigrants..."

The New York Times' long propaganda campaign supporting amnesty for illegal immigrants continued on the front of Thursday's National section, led by the paper's most slanted immigration reporter, Julia Preston -- "U.S. Citizens Join Illegal Immigrants In Pressing Lawmakers for Change."

Preston can hardly contain her enthusiasm for the movement, especially when she's discussing the "Dreamers" – the young people brought to the country illegally pushing for an accelerated path to citizenship.

The New York Times continued to push its pet cause of immigration "reform," involving mass amnesty for illegals in the United States. In a twist, immigration reporter Julia Preston reported Tuesday on amnesty GOP-style, featuring the views of Fla. Republican Sen. Marco Rubio: "Rubio Pushes His Party On Immigration Changes."

Rubio's favorable coverage (his "star is rising rapidly in his party") certainly marks a change from the paper's usual cool approach to Republican policymakers and policy. Could it be because Rubio stand on immigration hews more closely to the paper's editorial line that most GOP senators?

Sunday's New York Times lead story on immigration by Julia Preston,"Obama Will Seek Citizenship path In One Fast Push," seemed a strange choice -- unless you remembered how the Times has long been pushing for immigration "reform" that would include amnesty for illegal immigrants and a path to citizenship.

Notice this is not breaking news; it's something "senior administration officials and lawmakers said last week." By contrast, the Washington Post hasn't run an immigration story this past week, much less in the lead slot, which suggests the Times is trying to make news instead of breaking it.

2012 was another banner year for bias at the New York Times, from slanted coverage of campaign 2012, to bizarre displays of unfairness to conservatives. The Times also intensified its push for liberal legislation on issues dear to the heart of its readership, like fighting "climate change" and amnesty for illegal immigrants. Here are some of the worst bits of bias from the year that was. (There's a more comprehensive version of this article on Times Watch.)

Taking Sides With Mitt Romney's Snobby Liberal Neighbors

Epitomizing the paper's social liberalism, the front of the June 7 New York Times Home section (!) featured a large story targeting Republican nominee Mitt Romney that made the paper's notorious front-page investigation into Ann Romney's horse look as significant as Watergate by comparison.

You know there's something afoot when the New York Times portrays former President George W. Bush as a fount of wisdom. Julia Preston, the paper's most slanted-immigration reporter, reported from D.C. on Wednesday, "Praising Immigrants, Bush Leads Conservative Appeal for G.O.P. to Soften Tone."

Preston, who is unabashedly pro-amnesty, doesn't actually name these "conservatives" supporting amnesty, though the ever-reliable Richard Land makes his usual appearance in this standard-issue Times article, as a stand in for all "religious conservatives breaking away from the GOP on amnesty."

The New York Times continued to push for amnesty for illegal immigrants, this time on Saturday's front page, courtesy of its most reliable pro-amnesty reporter, Julia Preston, reporting from New Haven, "Young Immigrants Say It's Obama's Time to Act." For the umpteenth time the paper boasted of illegals emerging "from the shadows" (although for a such a frightened group, they sure do get their pictures in the Times a lot).

President Obama on Friday bypassed Congress to put in place the New York Times' beloved Dream Act by executive order that halted deportation of young people who came to the United States illegally. That merited Saturday's lead story slot, occupied by immigration beat reporter Julia Preston and John Cushman, "Obama To Permit Young Migrants To Remain In U.S."

Preston and Cushman devoted precisely two of their 28 paragraphs to opposing views from "angry" Republicans in Congress. The rest were devoted to Obama's announcement, joyful illegals, and their liberal supporters happy that immigrants could finally, as the Times has reported ad nauseum, "come out of the shadows" (Preston's reporting in particular is notoriously pro-amnesty.) And the paper's succeeding stories on the issue were little better.

Just as she did on Wednesday, the New York Times's pro-amnesty immigration reporter Julia Preston portrayed Arizona's popular crackdown on illegal immigration (now before the Supreme Court) as controversial in "A Hearing And Rallies Over a Law In Arizona." Thursday's edition also featured an above-the-fold front-page photo of a stoic Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer passing "opponents of her state's immigration law outside the Supreme Court."

There are politically motivated hearings every day on Capitol Hill. So why did the New York Times single out one in particular for coverage? Likely because it was led by liberal Sen. Chuck Schumer and exploting the Times' favorite cause, the defense of illegal immigrants.

Immigration-beat reporter Julia Preston, one of the paper's most reliably pro-amnesty reporters, authored Wednesday's "Fierce Debate on Arizona Immigration Law on Eve of Supreme Court Hearing."

On Monday Julia Preston, one of the New York Times's most reliably pro-amnesty reporters, slid into Denver bureau chief Kirk Johnson's usual slot of using a news story to promote a different kind of Western Republican (i.e. not one of those harsh conservatives), in this case Utah Attorney General Mark Shurtleff, who is "A Die-Hard Conservative, but Not on Immigrants."

He is a Republican and a Mormon. He opposes abortion. Mark L. Shurtleff, the attorney general of Utah, also rejects President Obama’s health care law as an assault on states’ rights and he went to Washington last week to urge the Supreme Court to throw it out.

There’s a jubilant undercurrent in Julia Preston’s Tuesday report in the New York Times on Obama’s new policy limiting deportations of illegal immigrants who have not committed a crime, “U.S. Issues New Deportation Policy’s First Reprieves.”

Preston has a reputation for sympathetic coverage of illegal immigration policy. In December 2010 she lamented a Senate vote blocking a bill granting amnesty to illegal immigrant students as a “painful setback.”

New York Times reporter Julia Preston’s “news analysis” on Sunday on the Senate defeat of legislation granting amnesty to hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants, known as the Dream Act by supporters (“Immigration Vote Leaves Obama’s Policy in Disarray”) is a reversal of the emotion displayed in her previous celebratory coverage of even the puniest symbolic gatherings of pro-“Dream Act” protesters involving as few as four students.

Preston seemed anguished about what she called a “painful setback” to granting amnesty to perhaps hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrant students, suggesting it was a particular setback for Obama.

The vote by the Senate on Saturday to block a bill to grant legal status to hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrant students was a painful setback to an emerging movement of immigrants and also appeared to leave the immigration policy of the Obama administration, which has supported the bill and the movement, in disarray. The bill, known as the Dream Act, gained 55 votes in favor with 41 against, a tally short of the 60 votes needed to bring it to the floor for debate. Five Democrats broke ranks to vote against the bill, while only three Republicans voted for it. The defeat in the Senate came after the House of Representatives passed the bill last week.

Preston tried to minimize the reach of the "tailored" bill.

The result, although not unexpected, was still a rebuff to President Obama by newly empowered Republicans in Congress on an issue he has called one of his priorities. Supporters believed that the bill -- tailored to benefit only immigrants who were brought here illegally when they were children and hoped to attend college or enlist in the military -- was the easiest piece to pass out of a larger overhaul of immigration laws that Mr. Obama supports.

The New York Times promoted the "DREAM Act" on Saturday with a Julia Preston article that never located a single lobbyist for stricter immigration enforcement. Instead, Preston assisted in publicizing a major administration push: "Five cabinet secretaries have made calls, held news conferences or blogged on the issue." It didn't matter how ridiculous it sounded to border enforcers: 

On a call organized by the White House on Friday, David Aguilar, the deputy commissioner of Customs and Border Protection, said that strict eligibility requirements in the bill for young immigrants who are here would dissuade others outside the country from trying coming to the country illegally. Addressing concerns from lawmakers who say they want more border security before voting for the legislation, Mr. Aguilar said, “At no point in history has the border been as secure as it is today.”

New York Times reporter Julia Preston provided her predictably pro-amnesty slant in Wednesday story on the apparently deathless Dream Act, a bill up in the lame-duck session of Congress (it passed the House Wednesday night) that would provide amnesty for illegal immigrant students: “Illegal Immigrant Students Await Votes on Legal Status.”

With both houses of Congress set to vote this week on a bill that would give legal status to hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrant students, one of those students will wait for news of the outcome at an immigration detention center in Arizona.

The student, Hector Lopez, 21, was deported to Mexico in August after having lived with his family in Oregon since he was an infant. After two months of trying to find his bearings and a job in Mexico City, Mr. Lopez, who does not speak Spanish, traveled to the border last month and turned himself in to the immigration authorities, requesting asylum in the United States.

The New York Times maintained its usual labeling slant in its coverage of Arizona's new immigration law in Friday's story by Julia Preston, "Latino Groups Urge Boycott Of Arizona Over New Law."

Several large Latino and civil rights organizations on Thursday announced a business boycott of Arizona, saying that a tough anti-illegal immigration law there would lead to racial profiling and wrongful arrests.

The boycott call was led by the National Council of La Raza, or N.C.L.R., one of the nation's biggest Latino groups, and was joined by the League of United Latin American Citizens and the National Puerto Rican Coalition. The groups said they would ask members and supporters to refrain from planning conventions or conferences in Arizona and from buying goods produced in the state.

"The law is so extreme, and its proponents appear so immune to an appeal to reason, nothing short of these extraordinary measures is required," Janet Murguía, the president of N.C.L.R., said Thursday at a news conference in Washington.

Speaking of extreme: The unlabeled La Raza is a left-wing Hispanic activist group ("La Raza" stands for "the race,") leaving the group not much room to accuse others of making race-based appeals. And La Raza president Janet Murguia has a disturbingly authoritarian take on her political opponents.

Back in February 2008 she called for opinionators like Sean Hannity, Lou Dobbs and Glenn Beck to be removed from the airwaves because of their "hate speech" against illegal immigrants. (Revealingly, the Times's unquestioning story on the rant failed to place the inflammatory phrase "hate speech" in quotation marks, letting the smear stand as apparent fact.)

A “march” from Miami to Washington on behalf of illegal immigrants consisting of a grand total of four marchers somehow merited a 780-word New York Times article by reliably pro-amnesty reporter Julia Preston, “To Overhaul Immigration, Advocates Alter Tactics.”

By contrast, a massive anti-Obama rally that attracted over 100,000 people to the Capitol on September 12 resulted in virtually the same level of print coverage in the Times: A 932-word article.

The text box to Preston's story on Saturday read: “Hoping that a four-person walk will resonate in a way mass marches did not.” That lack of resonance was not through any fault of Times reporters like Preston, who mainstreamed the mass immigration marches of 2006 and 2007 and portrayed them in a positive light.

Preston certainly embraced the self-serving melodrama of the protesters:

Once again, the New York Times is expecting American taxpayers to care not only about the plight of illegal immigrants, but on the hardship imposed on their families back in Latin America because of the fitful U.S. crackdown on illegal immigration.

A front-page story on Thursday by Julia Preston blared "Fewer Latino Immigrants Send Money Home."

How did the paper find out? From a poll -- a poll from a Hillary Clinton strategist on Latino issues -- a fact Preston doesn't find fit to mention.

A story from Mexico-based reporter Elisabeth Malkin on Friday's front page trawls for sympathy for poor Mexicans who come to the United States illegally to find work. Malkin went to the town of El Rodeo to find that "Mexicans Miss Money From Workers Up North." (That would be the United States.)

At first glance this would seem to be a problem for Mexico. After all, who are we to interfere in another country's internal affairs, the Times editorial page might argue, as it has on myriad issues in the past.

"For years, millions of Mexican migrants working in the United States have sent money back home to villages like this one, money that allows families to pay medical bills and school fees, build houses and buy clothes or, if they save enough, maybe start a tiny business.

The New York Times' reliably pro-illegal immigrant reporter Julia Preston, fresh from using a survey compiled by a (unlabeled) Hillary presidential pollster to make a pro-illegal immigrant argument, returned to the beat Saturday with "Farmers Call Crackdown On Illegal Workers Unfair," which located another odd angle to defend amnesty for illegals -- it will hurt agribusiness.

"Facing the prospect of major layoffs of farmworkers during harvest season, growers and lawmakers from agricultural states spoke in dire terms yesterday about new measures by the Bush administration to crack down on employers of illegal immigrants.

"'This is not just painful, this is death to the American farmer,' Maureen Torrey, who runs a family dairy and vegetable farm in Elba, N. Y., said in a telephone interview.

U.S. hostility to amnesty for illegal immigrants from Mexico is not only hurting illegals here, but crippling poor Mexicans in Mexico as well. So says the New York Times, taking its talking points from a survey performed by a pollster.

To be precise, a Democratic pollster who studies Hispanic voting trends for Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign -- a tidbit that didn't get into reporter Julia Preston's sympathetic story on Mexican immigrants no longer sending cash home because of a hostile climate in the U.S.

Julia Preston's "Fewer Mexican Immigrants Are Sending Money Back Home, Bank Says" was based on a survey done by an unlabeled advocate for Latinos in the Democratic Party.