The firestorm over the Dallas Morning News' choice to give its "Texan of the Year" award to "The Illegal Immigrant" is threatening to engulf Keven Ann Willey and her paper. Here's her response. (The weakness of the writing will be familiar to Valley readers.)
We've engaged with readers individually via e-mail and telephone and in groups on the Web and over the airwaves. But let's be candid: 95 percent of all that reaction to our choice was negative. Readers we heard from were angry, insulted, in disbelief that we'd do such a thing. Some cancelled (sic) their newspaper subscriptions.
It was never our intent to anger readers – at least not gratuitously. Our goal was to provoke, yes, but in a way designed to elevate the issue of illegal immigration to the prominence it deserves and to increase the pressure on Congress to enact meaningful reforms to a system we called "a joke" in our essay.
The bottom line is that none of us should settle for snappy sound bites from politicians pledging gratuitously to "crack down" on illegal immigrants. We must push elected officials to move beyond the rhetorical appetizer and dig into the meat and potatoes.
Tim Carlson points out in the espresso pundit comment section that Michelle Malkin has more coverage.
Nonsense; they knew perfectly well that they were going to tick people off.
I haven't written an immigration story in four years that wasn't met with a hail of happy rants.
The difference is that I doubt it's the regular readers that are sounding off.
In the Google age, the hate messages are likely coming from some anonymous clown hiding in his parent's basement who has only the vaguest sense where the border actually is.
Posted by: Michel Marizco | January 09, 2008 at 06:37 PM