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NEW YORK TIMES COVERAGE OF PROPOSITION 187
Critical cultural studies theory argues that the function of media in modern capitalist societies is to help win the consent of the citizenry to the ideologies of the dominant elite. If this is true, one would expect that mainstream media coverage of a major social issue would focus on elite viewpoints on the issue and marginalize or exclude others. This study concerns two of the most volatile issues facing the United States today: race and illegal immigration. Both of these were key factors in the debate over California's Proposition 187, a 1994 plan to deny social services to the state's undocumented immigrants, the vast majority of whom are non-white. Using critical cultural and media sociology theories of ideology, race and the media, this study examines stories on 187 in the New York Times, arguably the nation's most influential newspaper, to see how elite viewpoints were featured in the coverage. More specifically, the study sought to discover how the elites viewed the racial aspect of 187, and how those racial viewpoints were portrayed in the coverage.
Ideology and Race
Using the language of semiology, Sumner (1979) defines ideology as a sign, "a composition of signifying unit and signified meaning in relation" (for example, the combination of the word "cup" and the mental images of a cup that the word conjures up). An ideological formation is a cluster or series of signs. For Sumner and other social-constructionist scholars, all human social practice is ideological, from the words that form our languages to the complex ideological formations that make up our belief systems. In this view, ideology isn't just a pervasive part of human experience: it is human experience. There is no reality outside it.
Ideologies, then, are systems of meaning within which people live in reality or, to put it differently, live their relationship to reality. They define how people experience the world, what they take for granted. Ideologies define what is taken to be common sense; the truth of ideological statements appears obvious and even natural...
When Richard Nixon and even Robert Kennedy went hunting for Communists in the 1950s, they honestly saw such figures everywhere and viewed them as a real menace. There was no way to argue against this ideology by appealing to some experience outside of another ideology; in other words, an ideology is self-contained and non-falsifiable (Grossberg, Wartella and Whitney, 1998: 191-192).
Sumner goes on to challenge the classical Marxist idea that ideologies develop solely from a society's economic structure. Instead, he argues, ideologies develop from all types of social practice, political and cultural as well as economic. Just as ideologies evolve from social practice, so do social practices, over time, develop from ideologies. Thus, all ideologies are social constructions which change over time as societies change. In order to discover ideological formations in media discourse, then, one must first understand the social function and historical context of the ideological formation in question.
Critical cultural scholars writing about race from this social-constructionist perspective (such as Stuart Hall, Kobena Mercer, Ruth Frankenberg, Michael Omi and Howard Winant, among others), argue that racial identities are ideological constructs. For these theorists, the ways in which race is represented and structured don't stay the same; instead, they're constantly evolving. Thus, they argue, there's no such thing as a racially fixed identity: not only are racial identities socially constructed, but they change over time as society changes.
For example, Omi and Winant (1994) argue that Europeans had no conception of racial difference in the modern sense until the conquest of the New World, where they justified their conquest of native peoples on the grounds that they were racially inferior. At first, this inferiority was established on religious grounds, since native Americans and the slaves brought over from Africa weren't Christians and thus "barbaric." In the 18th century came the Enlightenment, scientific rationality, democratic revolutions and the assertion of "natural rights" of "man." In such an environment, racial exploitation was difficult to justify. The solution was the establishment of scientific "proof" that non-white races were biologically inferior. These beliefs were challenged in the 20th century by the writings of thinkers such as Max Weber, W.E.B. Du Bois and Franz Boas, and by the political struggles of racially defined groups, all of which emphasized the social and political nature of racial difference. Although belief in the biological difference of races continues to this day,
we have now reached the point of fairly general agreement that race is not a biologically given but rather a socially constructed way of differentiating human beings. While a tremendous achievement, the transcendence of biologistic conceptions of race does not provide any reprieve from the dilemmas of racial injustice and conflict, nor from controversies over the significance of race in the present. Views of race as socially constructed simply recognize the fact that these conflicts and controversies are now more properly framed on the terrain of politics (Omi and Winant: p. 65).
Looking at U.S. racial history from this perspective, Omi and Winant argue that from the time of the first colony to the end of the Civil War (1607-1865), the United States was a racial dictatorship, with most non-whites unable to participate in politics. And for most of the following century, legalized segregation and denial of the vote were the norm in the South and much of the Southwest. Those barriers were overturned (at least in principle) by the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, "a great transformation of the political universe" which
permitted the entry of millions of racial minority group members into the political process...Political mobilization along racial lines resulted in the enactment of reforms which dramatically restructured the racial order, reorganized state institutions and launched whole new realms of state activity (Omi and Winant: 138).
In the late '60s and '70s, they continue, racial minorities used their new-found political clout to "to advance demands for a more thoroughgoing restructuring of the social order" (Omi and Winant: 139). As the '60s turned into the '70s, however, these struggles occurred in the context of steady U.S. economic and political decline, which by the 1980s had created a long list of woes:
Once the world's creditor, [the United States] had become its chief debtor; once the chief importer of manufactured goods, it was now their main importer. ..Once able to guarantee a prosperous and secure future to its citizens, the U.S. now contemplated a minimum unemployment rate (in periods of economic expansion, to say nothing of contraction) of 7 percent and a national debt which by 1984 had reached the $200 billion per annum range. Since 1970 the U.S. had experienced defeat in war, the impeachment and resignation of a President, an inflationary peak of 22 percent [and] peacetime shortages of oil and gas...It had also witnessed the election of a President whose chief commitment was to stem the tide of deterioration these events reflected (Omi and Winant: 137-8).
In the wake of this economic decline came a backlash against racial minorities that was still going strong at the time of the 1994 Proposition 187 debate. For Omi and Winant, this backlash found its voice in three principal mainstream discourses: neoconservatism, the New Right, and most recently, Bill Clinton's neoliberalism.
Although neoconservatives claimed to endorse the principle of racial equality, they understood it in a new way. For the neoconservatives, each individual had equal rights under the law. But since the 1970s, the state had given preferential treatment to minority groups, thus generating racial discrimination against whites. (The recent Hopwood decision is a good example of neoconservative thinking in action.)
The New Right, as exemplified by the Reagan Administration and its allies, responded to the nation's economic downturn in the 1970s by advocating tax cuts for the wealthy as a way of stimulating the economy and simultaneously demonizing poor members of minority groups as creators of their own ill fortune through lack of moral fiber. According to Reeves and Campbell (1994), the Reagan Administration put this philosophy into action in the War on Drugs. With the aid of the media, they proclaimed a "crack epidemic" in the nation's inner cities caused not by the country's myriad social problems, such as deindustrialization, job migration and declining wages, but rather by individual moral decay. (Omi and Winant argue that the Reagan Administration also embraced the neoconservative position of racial colorblindness in atttacking Affirmative Action and school busing programs as reverse discrimination.)
In the early 1990s, key events in U.S. racial politics included the Rodney King beating and the Los Angeles riot of 1992 and the continuing debates over "multiculturalism" and "political correctness." Omi and Winant argue that the key to Bill Clinton's success in the 1992 election was his decision not to address these issues but to avoid them. This strategy, which they refer to as a "neoliberal" project, reflects a belief that discussions of race are "divisive" and alienating to increasing numbers of disaffected white suburban voters. Although it acknowledges social problems, it seeks to address them with universal programs that appeal to a broad cross-section of the populace rather than group-targeted ones, such as more jobs, better education and increased social investment (Omi and Winant, 1994: 147-150).
Ideology and the Media
For critical cultural theorists, the media play a key role in developing race constructions and other ideological formations in a society. To understand that role, these theorists draw heavily on the work of Antonio Gramsci, who reconceptualized Marx's theories of how a modern capitalist state functions. Rather than a "ruling class" exerting absolute power in society by controlling the means of production, Gramsci hypothesized a much more complex, volatile world in which not only classes, but subgroups within classes, vied with each other for power (Hall, 1996). Gramsci rejects the idea of one class dominating society, hypothesizing instead a "historic bloc" that includes not only elements of the dominant class but also of the subordinate classes as well, who have been won over by the dominant class through concesssions and compromises.
Since achieving dominance in a modern industrial state requires winning the consent of the masses, for Gramsci this struggle is increasingly an ideological one. For ideology to be useful in helping a historic bloc win dominance, it must be able to, in Hall's words, "enter into, modify and transform the practical everyday consciousness or popular thought of the massses. The latter is what [Gramsci] calls 'common sense'" (Hall, 1996: 431). In a modern industrial state, the best way to do this is through the industry whose business is communication with the masses: the mass media.
The question then arises: how can an industry that prides itself on its independence from society's centers of power get used by those same power blocs? As Hall explains, it is precisely because of the widespread belief in the media's autonomy that the media have become key institutions in modern capitalist societies for securing the consent of the governed to the dominant ideologies.
So how is that possible? Media practitioners define news as information that's timely, unusual, dramatic, and has a significant impact on the audience, to list a few of the primary journalistic conventions. The problem then becomes which timely, unusual and dramatic events to write about. Also, if an editor has two "newsworthy" stories, which one gets better play? One way the media solve these problems is to create an informal hierarchy of news sources -- the people from whom reporters get the information on which their stories are based. Gans (1979) found that the media overwhelmingly base their stories on information from official sources -- representatives of political, business, social and cultural institutions. Of those, political sources predominate, and of the political sources, national sources predominate.
Scholars have found a number of reasons why reporters rely on official sources. For example, Tuchman (1978) argues that the media, as commercial enterprises, need credible, reliable daily sources of information to stay in business. Official sources have proven themselves over time to be credible and reliable because they represent institutions recognized by the public as legitimate (the police department, city hall, Congress) and because they have information in whch the public is interested and which therefore is "newsworthy." Because official sources can be counted on to provide "news," Tuchman continues, the media tend to station reporters in places where official sources are located, like Washington, D.C., which makes reporters even more reliant on those sources.
Some would say that the media's code of objectivity, in which at least two sides of an issue are presented dispassionately, keep media content from being biased. But Tuchman (1978), Herman and Chomsky (1988), Altschull (1995) and others argue that despite the mainstream media's "objective" reporting, the "official" viewpoint tends to prevail in the news because of the dominance of official sources.
Gans' ethnographic study of the national news media, Deciding What's News, (1979), provides additional evidence that the media serve as "agents of power," to borrow Altschull's phrase. Gans argues that the news contains "enduring values," principles which are privileged over time in news stories. One of these is the desirability of social order. As a result, one frequently sees stories about social disturbances, such as demonstrations or riots, with the emphasis not so much on what the demonstrations or riots were about, but rather on the restoration of order by public officials.
The frequency of social order stories raises the question, Whose order is being restored? Since the news is dominated by official sources, Gans continues, their definition of order is what news stories emphasize. "With some oversimplification," he writes, "it would be fair to say that the news supports the social order of public, businesss and professional, upper-middle-class, middle-aged, and white male sectors of society" (p. 61).
Other values in the news also tend to protect the social order of the powerful, Gans argues. "Altruistic democracy" and "ethnocentrism" refer to the ways in which the American political system and American "values and practices" are always framed in a positive light. And, although individualism is idealized, this value is tempered to some extent by the value of "moderatism:" as Gans puts it, "individualism which violates the law, the dominant mores, and enduring values is suspect."
Research Questions
If these theorists are correct, then one would expect mainstream media coverage of a major social issue over time to concentrate its focus on the viewpoints of the powerful. Journalistic norms allow for elites to disagree, and for opponents to disagree with the viewpoints of the elite. Coverage constructed in such a way doesn't allow for media endorsement of a specific elite viewpoint, but it does allow elite viewpoints to set the parameters of the discussion. As Hall (1982) explains:
"Opposing arguments are easy to mount. Changing the terms of an argument is exceedingly difficult, since the dominant definition of the problem acquires, by repetition, and by the weight and credibility of those who propose or subscribe to it, the weight of 'common sense' (Hall, 1982: 81).
Thus, for this study, I sought to discover whether the New York Times coverage of Proposition 187 would be dominated by elite viewpoints. The elites whose viewpoints I most closely examine were the top California politicians where were running for office in 1994 at the same time that 187 was being debated: gubernatorial candidates Pete Wilson and Kathleen Brown and senatorial candidates Dianne Feinstein and Michael Huffington.
2) Omi and Winant argue that the backlash against racial minorities in the United States since the 1970s is primarily expressed in three discourses: neoconservative "racially colorblindness," the New Right demonization of poor non-white populations, and the neoliberal discourse of racial universalism that acknowledges social problems but refuses to address the racial aspects of these problems on the grounds that racial discussions are "divisive." Although these racial discourses weren't created by political elites, Omi and Winant explain, they were embraced by elites as a way of gaining -- and maintaining -- power. As mentioned earlier, the Reagan Administration adopted both the neoconservative and New Right discourses in the 1980s, and the Clinton Administration endorsed neoliberalism in the 1990s.
Just as those "backlash" racial discourses grew out of the country's post-1960s social and economic problems, Proposition 187's targeting of a predominantly non-white undocumented immigrant population grew out of a major social and economic downturn in California. So, I wanted to see if I could find examples of Omi and Winant's backlash racial discourses in the Proposition 187 coverage. More specifically, I wanted to find out whether elite views on the racial aspects of 187 resembled those discourses.
Method
The study focuses on the universe of 89 New York Times stories published on Proposition 187, from the first story it ran on the issue in May, 1994, through Election Day in November, 1994, to the story it ran on Dec. 15, 1994, the day after a federal judge ruled that most of the proposition was unconstitutional. The Times was chosen for analysis since it's widely viewed as the most influential U.S. newspaper: it has a large national circulation and its wire service stories appear in publications throughout the nation. Studies have found that it's the leading source of information for government elites and that its stories influence public policy (Weiss, 1974). Moreover, Gans (1979) found that the national networks and newsmagazines view the Times as a professional standard-setter, using it routinely to find out what it believes are the day's top stories and how it handles them (pp. 180-81).
Sumner offers five basic techniques for uncovering ideological formations in discourse (Sumner, 1979: 191-192): 1) the perception of repetitions of statements, words or phrases; 2) the perception of assumptions contained in certain statements; 3) the observation of inconsistencies within an argument or betweeen the argument of one day and that of the next; 4) the observation that certain topics are never dealt with in the discourse, and 5) the grasp of the general drift of a systematic discourse or series of discourses.
Also useful was the definition of media frames provided by Gitlin (1980): "[p]ersistent patterns of cognition, interpretation, and presentation, of selection, emphasis and exclusion by which symbol-handlers routinely organize discourse" (p. 7).
Finally, analysis of the ideological formations in the 187 discourse was guided by the three-point outline suggested by Foss (1996) for analyzing ideology in cultural artifacts:
1) Identification of the nature of the ideology. What is the preferred reading of the artifact? What does the artifact ask the audience to believe, understand, feel or think about? What are the particular characteristics, roles, actions or ways of seeing being commended in the artifact? What are the assumptions or premises of the artifact? What does the artifact suggest is unacceptable, negative, undesirable, marginal and insignificant?
2) Identification of interests included. Whose interests are privileged or favored in the ideology? Whose interests are negated, unexpressed, oppressed or not represented in the ideology?
3) Identification of strategies in support of the ideology. What rhetorical features of the artifact account for the rise to dominance of one ideology over others? What rhetorical strategies are used to create and support the ideology? How does the rhetoric legitimate the ideology and the interests of some groups over others?
Findings
a. Background
As mentioned earlier, the United States experienced an economic downturn in the 1970s, which was followed by a backlash against racial minorities (Omi and Winant, 1994). This pattern was reproduced in California in the 1990s (McCarthy and Vernez, 1997). During the 1980s, the California economy had grown by 350,000 jobs a year, and the immigrant population grew by 287,000 people each year. From 1990-95, however, the state endured its worst recession since the 1930s. During the recession's first three years, the state lost 135,000 jobs a year, while the immigration flow abated only slightly, down to an average of 270,000 people a year.
In this harsh economic climate, residents grew increasingly apprehensive of the growing non-white immigrant population -- in particular, the state's million or so undocumented immigrants, the vast majority of whom were non-white (McCarthy and Vernez). It was in this environment that the state sought to close its budget deficit by having the federal government cover the perceived high costs of providing services to the undocumented. Since enforcement of immigration laws is the sole responsibility of the federal government, state and local costs incurred by a failure of the federal government to prevent illegal immigration are arguably also a responsibility of the federal government. However, faced with federal inaction on this issue, another solution was proposed (McCarthy and Vernez: 235-237).
In early 1994, a petition began circulating in California to put on the state's November election ballot a proposal to deny social services, primarily education and non-emergency medical care, to undocumented immigrants. Such a measure was needed, proponents argued, because these services were costing the state billions of dollars it could ill afford to spend: indeed, the proposal was initially dubbed the SOS (Save Our State) bill. Once on the ballot, it became known as Proposition 187. After a long and heated debate, California voters overwhelmingly approved the measure (59 percent in favor, 41 percent against). But on Dec. 14, a federal judge blocked implementation of the proposition because it appeared to conflict with federal law.
b. Elite discourse
On California's election ballot of November 1994, voters were asked to make a decision not only on Proposition 187, but on candidates for governor and U.S. senator as well. When 187 became the dominant issue of the election, the four leading candidates for governor and senator -- Pete Wilson, Kathleen Brown, Dianne Feinstein and Michael Huffington -- were forced to take positions on the issue. The primary elite supporter of 187 was Wilson, the California governor, who would use his successful 1994 gubernatorial re-election campaign as a springboard for his pursuit of the Republican nomination for president in 1995. (Senatorial candidate Michael Huffington, who wound up losing to incumbent Sen. Dianne Feinstein in November, was also a 187 supporter.) Wilson, like the other 187 supporters, wanted to cut off social services to undocumented immigrants. According to a Sept. 25 Times story, he also called federal immigration policy a "dismal failure" and wanted stronger border patrols and federal reimbursement for the state's expenditures on services to the undocumented:
Mr. Wilson supports passage of the proposition, fully embracing the argument that economically pressed California must take drastic action to stem a costly "invasion" of illegal aliens because the Federal Government either cannot or will not.
"It's the two-by-four we need to make them take notice in Washington," he said of the initiative. "We will finally force Washington to accept responsibility."
Primary liberal opposition to 187 included State Treasurer Kathleen Brown, Wilson's opponent in the gubernatorial election, and Feinstein, the U.S. senator who was running for re-election. According to the Times Sept. 25 piece, Brown agreed that the federal government needed to do a better job of keeping out the undocumented; however, she thought 187 was not only a bad solution, but also an unconstitutional one:
...State Treasurer Kathleen Brown...opposes the measure on the ground that it would make a bad problem worse and eventually be declared unconstitutional.
"What we really need," she said, "is for the Federal Government to properly police our border and enforce laws already on the books."
Like many of the proposition's opponents, Ms. Brown is especially concerned about a section of the measure that would require parents of all schoolchildren, including American citizens, to prove legal residence. She calls that approach "invasive" and an affront to basic human rights.
In an Oct. 22 story on Feinstein's announcement of her opposition to 187, Feinstein agrees with Brown that 187 raises constitutional questions and also argues that the proposition had serious practical problems as well:
She argued that the initiative might lead Washington to cut off $15 billion a year in Federal health and education money should it be determined that some of the proposal's tougher provisions trampled the rights of individuals.
Further, she said, the initiative is particularly flawed because it includes no provisions to speed the deporting of illegal aliens or to slow the number slipping across the border nightly.
Equally troublesome, she warned, the initiative would throw thousands of young people out of school and onto the streets, where many might embrace lives of crime. She also warned that by cutting off nonemergency health care to illegal aliens, the state would run the risk of epidemics.
These elite themes are all reflected in the Times' own opinion on 187, presented in an Oct. 25 editorial (two weeks before the election). Like Feinstein, the Times states that 187 is impractical, considering that its "punitive provisions" could cause Washington to cut off as much as $15 billion in aid. Like Brown, the Times believes 187 is mean-spirited. As the editorial phrases it:
"These benefits [for the undocumented] cost state taxpayers money. But the right answer is not to throw alien children and the ill onto the streets."
And like Wilson, the Times refers to "failures" in federal immigration policy (although it never states what, specifically, those failures are) and recommends that Washington reimburse California and other states for "the consequences of federal immigration policies."
When one turns to the Times' news stories on the issue, one finds that they present the 187 issue much the same way that the Oct. 25 editorial does -- as a fairly straightforward, two-sided debate. On one side of the issue, 187 supporters argue for denial of social services to immigrants and an increase in federal financial support to help deal with the undocumented. On the other, 187 opponents argue that such a proposal is not only mean-spirited but probably unconstitutional, and that a better solution is stricter enforcement of the border. These parameters for the discussion remain in place even when the sources quoted are non-elites. For example, although the Times' Sept. 25 story focuses on Wilson's and Brown's positions on the issue, it also includes this position statement from the spokesman for Taxpayers Against 187:
"Sure there's an immigration problem," said Joel Maliniak, the organization's spokesman. "But the answer is to strictly patrol the border and strictly enforce laws about hiring illegals, not throw kids out of school and their parents out of health clinics. If the Federal Government concludes 187 impinges on people's civil rights, the proposition will backfire because Washington will then cut off the $15 billion in health and school aid that it sends to the state each year."
Even when elite politicians or their spokespeople aren't used as spokespeople for a story, elite positions on 187 set the parameters of the discussion. In a Nov. 1 story on growing minority opposition to 187, sources cite constitutional issues as the primary reason for their opposition:
With Proposition 187 headed for a vote on Nov. 8, [Ruben] Rodriguez, who runs a bakery in east Los Angeles, is worried about America and its immigrant success story. He wonders what kind of opportunity the future will hold if the proposition is approved.
"Passing it would be a terrible step backward," he said. "I know there's an immigration problem. But 187 is no answer. It's just lashing out without rhyme or reason, and the people who will be targeted and questioned will be the people whose skin is not white, particularly Latinos and Asians. We can't let it pass."...
The requirement is nothing less than a constitutional insult to Miya Iwataki, a second-generation Japanese-American who is organizing Asian-Americans in Los Angeles to fight Proposition 187.
"The word 'suspect' just sends chills all through me," she said. "Am I to be treated different just because I don't look like the white majority?"...
"We've got to send a message to the rest of the nation that California will not stand on a platform of bigotry, racism and scapegoating," declared Joe Hicks, the executive director of the Los Angeles branch of the Southern Christian Ladership Conference, one of the country's major civil rights organizations.
c. Racial Discourse
When one studies the New York Times' presentation of the viewpoints of California's elite politicans on 187, one finds that although they didn't agree on the issue, they did agree that undocumented immigrants were causing a major problem for the state. Their differences lie in their opinions on how to solve that problem. Pete Wilson sees 187 as a solution; Kathleen Brown and Dianne Fienstein argue for stricter enforcement of existing laws against undocumented immigration. And because the coverage focuses on the elite definitions of the issue, the belief that "illegal immgrants are causing a problem" was a key theme of the coverage. Unfortunately, by allowing that discourse to dominate its coverage, the Times either marginalized or ignored altogether alternative ways of looking at the undocumented immigration issue.
For example, a number of scholars have shown (recent analyses include Montejano, 1987; Gutierrez, 1995; Foley, 1997) that the undocumented have been an important source of labor for U.S. businesses for the past century. In fact, the understanding that the undocumented come to the United States looking for work is so widespread that both editorials and news stories in the Times and other mainstream newspapers state that jobs are most likely the lure bringing the undocumented to this country.
In its Oct. 25 editorial the Times states (without attribution) that jobs, not social services, are the lure that brings the undocumented to the United States:
Proposition 187, named "Save Our State" by its proponents, is based on the premise that California's social services are the main magnet drawing illegal immigrants across the border. Turning off that magnet, they argue, will deter new arrivals.
But no matter how harsh benefit policies become, the lure of California's jobs and wages are likely to keep attracting Mexicans, Central Americans and others over the border and keep most of the 1.5 million illegal aliens now estimated to be in the state from voluntarily returning home.
On other occasions, Times reporters indicate in their 187 stories (also without providing substantiating evidence) that jobs are what draws the undocumented. For example, in an article published on Oct. 30, 1994, reporter Ashley Dunn writes:
Proposition 187, called "Save Our State," would deny social services like schooling and non-emergency medical care to illegal immigrants. The visible targets of the measure are the waves of undocumented workers, but it underscores growing discomfort with the number of newcomers.
If it's true that the undocumented come to the United States for jobs, then presumably some responsibility for the immigration "problem" should be borne by the businesses who employ them. However, Times reporters never follow up unattributed comments like the ones above with any evidence that jobs are what draw the undocumented. In the story cited above, for example, Ashley Dunn interviews Kevin McCarthy, a Rand Corporation researcher who argues in a recent book that the undocumented join the U.S. labor force in greater percentages than legal immigrants. However, in the Dunn piece McCarthy doesn't comment on the jobs issue at all:
Kevin McCarthy, coordinator of California research for the Rand Corporation, said that for all the current angst over immigration, history suggests that the backlash will eventually recede as immigrants adapt and as society as a whole changes through exposure to the newcomers.
"I am optimistic about these things," Mr. McCarthy said. "Time is the only issue. All the evidence I see suggests that the kids and grandkids of these immigrants will become indistinguishable from the rest of society."
Although the Times allows McCarthy to present comforting words about the future of immigration, the present-day immigration "problem" remains untouched -- he doesn't comment in the story about jobs or any other aspect of the 187 issue. In this story, as with the other stories in its coverage, the elite frame of "illegals are the problem" is allowed to remain unchallenged.
In addition, even when sources mention the jobs issue, their comments aren't followed up with further discussion. For example, in its Nov. 4 story on the so-called "nannygate" incident, in which it was disclosed that both Sen. Dianne Feinstein and Michael Huffington, her challenger in the senatorial election, had hired undocumented workers as housekeepers, the Times writes:
Ms. Feinstein opposes a much-disputed California ballot initiative, Proposition 187...
Mr. Huffington favors the initiative. Before it was disclosed that he had hired an undocumented nanny, he argued that the proposal would help reduce the hiring of illegal aliens. Ms. Feinstein says the initiative would be too Draconian but has called throughout her campaign for tighter enforcement of hiring laws and more patrolling of the border.
The article about Ms. Feinstein's housekeeper was sent over the Internet, the global computer network, by the Free Press.
Here, the candidates' positions against hiring the undocumented are invoked to highlight the apparent contradictions between their public positions and their personal practices. But clearly, larger issues are at stake as well. Huffington wants to reduce the hiring of illegal workers -- presumably that means he believes too many illegals are being hired. Is that the case, and if so, why are non-citizens being hired in the midst of a recession? Feinstein wants tighter enforcement of hiring laws, implying that existing laws against hiring the undocumented aren't being enforced properly. How could that be happening in a state so adamantly opposed to undocumented immigration? Unfortunately, none of these questions are addressed in this article, or in any other article in the Times 187 coverage.
Elsewhere, the jobs issue is briefly invoked in a way that supports the "undocumented are the problem" frame. In a Nov. 1 article, "Minorities Join California Fight," Mexican-American Jesse Laguna tells reporter B. Drummond Ayres Jr. that he's concerned about losing his job to an undocumented immigrant:
There's good support for 187 in the Mexican-American community, and it should come as no surprise. An illegal Latino can very easily cost a Latino-American a job, and nobody understands that better than the American.
This quote appeared in the story as an example of why some Latinos support 187 -- with no further elaboration offered. In this context, the implication is that it's the immigrant's fault that the U.S. citizen isn't getting a job, rather than the fault of the people doing the hiring. In addition, there's no evidence provided, in this or any of the other Times stories on 187, of whether Laguna's fear was justified -- or of whether 187 would keep the undocumented from crossing the border in search of jobs.
Another way the Times perpetuates the "illegals are the problem" frame is by denying the undocumented a voice in the coverage. This study found no interviews with the undocumented on the 187 issue until after the proposal passed, when the Times did a story on how the undocumented were reacting to the new law (New York Times, Nov. 21, 1994: In California, Uncertainty Chills Illegal Aliens). Although the Times did interview non-official sources, these were U.S. citizens exclusively until after 187 was approved.
Why this reluctance to use the undocumented as sources, given the fact that they were the focus of the issue? As mentioned earlier, one of the "enduring values" Gans found in the news was social order, and clearly, the undocumented are violating that order by entering the country illegally. In its Oct. 25 editorial, the Times reminds its readers that the undocumented are outlaws in America: "Illegal aliens, by definition, have no legal right to be in the U.S." In addition, Gans argues, the news is much less concerned with the reasons for the social disruption (in this case, the reasons that the undocumented are here in violation of the law) than it is with the restoration of order (in this case, how to prevent the undocumented from causing problems). Gans also points out that how one defines "order" depends on who's doing the defining: as mentioned earlier, Gans found that the news tends to support the social order of upper-middle class, white, male business and professional people -- in other words, the social order of the elites.
Another enduring value Gans found was "ethnocentrism": the valorization of American values and practices, and the stigmatization of people, places and things seen to be in conflict with those values. An example from the Times that would seem to fit that category is its repeatedly referring to the undocumented as "aliens." Although linguistically correct, this usage reminds us that the Times is serving as a conduit for the socially-sanctioned practice of labelling non-residents as being somehow strange or hostile. Perhaps this deviance is what justifies paternalistic treatment by presumably well-meaning members of the dominant culture -- such as New York Times editorial writers. "[Social services for the undocumented] cost taxpayers money," states the Oct. 25 editorial. "But the right answer is not to throw alien children and the ill onto the streets." The fact that the Times feels compelled to give its well-educated readers a lecture in common decency implies that it sees the desire to punish the undocumented as perhaps misguided -- but quite understandable.
The Times further supports the "undocumented immigrants problem" frame by not challenging 187 supporters' claims that the undocumented come to the United States to get free social services, despite comments by Times reporters and editorial writers that they don't believe those claims are true. In story after story the Times repeats those claims without ever asking 187 supporters for substantiating evidence.
Consider this excerpt from a Times story on May 22, 1994, one of its first on 187:
...In addition to cutting off free social services, the proposal would require teachers, health care workers and the police to report the presence of any "apparent illegal immigrants" they deal with.
Without these services, argued Harold Ezell, one of the initiative's authors and a former Western regional chief of the Immigration and Naturalization Service, illegal aliens would "go back where they came from."
Opponents of the proposal acknowledge that they will have a hard time defeating it...
As this excerpt shows, the SOS supporter, Ezell, is allowed to express his belief that the undocumented are here for services, without being asked to provide any evidence of that. Instead, the reporter switches in the next paragraph to comments from the measure's opponents -- on another topic.
Further, 187 supporters claim the costs of providing services to the undocumented are so high that the state is going bankrupt because of it. An Oct. 30 Times story, "In California, the Numbers Add Up to Anxiety," begins by quoting a 187 backer on this topic:
"Enough is enough," said William King, executive vice president of Americans Against Illegal Immigration, based in Southern California. Mr. King is a moving force in putting an anti-illegal immigration proposition on next week's statewide ballot. "We're going broke in this state. It's just the enormity of the situation."
But again, the Times never provides any documentation to back up or refute this claim, despite the Times' own claim in a Sept. 25 story that "reliable figures on illegal immigration and its cost to Federal and state agencies are difficult to come by because of the inherently shadowy nature of the problem."
Conclusion
Elite sources covered by the Times didn't agree on 187 -- but by concentrating its focus on elite definitions of the issue, the Times allowed the elite to set the parameters of the discussion. Also, the Times focus on the California elite's identification of the undocumented as "the problem" seems to resemble the backlash racial politics outlined by Omi and Winant in that it successfully marginalizes a predominantly non-white population without overtly stigmatizing them because of race.
Omi and Winant (1994) argue that one of the enduring legacies of the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s is that the principle of racial equality of opportunity has become so firmly established in mainstream political discourse that to publicly argue against it is to stigmatize oneself politically and socially. However, forms of racial backlash that have emerged in the last two decades allow their proponents to marginalize racial groups without resorting to the overt racisms of the past. For example, as mentioned earlier, Reeves and Campbell (1994) argue that the New Right, through its War on Drugs, blamed drug use and other problems of poor non-whites living in the nation's inner cities on the moral decay of poor populations rather than on the myriad social ills of the time. Thus, rather than describing inner-city residents as being deviant because they had black or brown skin, they were described as deviant because of various moral failings. This discourse was embraced not only by conservatives, but by liberals as well. For example, Sen. Charles Robb, President Lyndon Johnson's son-in-law, said that in LBJ's time, racism severely limited social opportunities for African-Americans. Now, however, "it's time to shift the primary focus...to [African-Americans'] self-defeating patterns of behavior, the new enemy within" (Reeves and Campbell: 100).
According to Reeves and Campbell, the media's frame of the War on Drugs was largely shaped by this New Right discourse embraced by elite politicians across the political spectrum. Similarly, the New York Times coverage of Proposition 187 was shaped by the discourse of California's elite politicians (both liberal and conservative) that focused on the the predominantly non-white population of undocumented immigrants as "the problem." By framing the undocumented as deviant, the Times coverage helped perpetuate the elite "blame the victim" discourse that diverted public attention from other important aspects of the complex immigration issue, such as the significant extent to which U.S. business is dependent on cheap immigrant labor.
References
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Articles from The New York Times
"Move in California to Bar Service to Aliens," May 22, 1994, p. 18.
"A Ballot Proposition Gives Voters the Opportunity to Influence National Immigration Policy," Sept. 25, 1994, p. 8.
"Feinstein Faults Alien Proposal," Oct. 22, 1994, p. 1.
"Indecent Proposition in California," Oct. 25, 1994, p. 20.
"In California, the Numbers Add Up to Anxiety," Oct. 30, 1994, p. 3.
"Minorities Join California Fight," Nov. 1, 1994, p. 1.
"Immigration Issue Flares Anew in Senate Race," Nov. 4, 1994, p. 29.
"In California, Uncertainty Chills Illegal Aliens," Nov. 21, 1994, p. 10.