2017 | XLVI-4

For Fairness, Balance and Accuracy in News Reporting

DON IRVINE: Welcome to The Bias Buzz. I’m Don Irvine, and I’m joined today by my very special guest, Mark Krikorian, the Executive Director of

the Center for Immigration Studies. Welcome, Mark.

MARK KRIKORIAN: Glad to be here.

IRVINE: Well, let’s start—you know, let’s go back about 30 years or so, to Simpson-Mazzoli. Talk about it. Give me a little bit of education about that, and what happened there.

KRIKORIAN: That was the big amnesty passed in 1986. It was the result of about five or six years of Congress going back and forth with different versions of bills, because there had been a Presidential Commission that recommended some—made some immigration recommendations, including, for the first time, prohibiting the employment of illegal immigrants. Eventually, after five or six years of wrangling—where the House passes one version, and the Senate passes a different version—in 1986, they finally passed law that President [Ronald] Reagan signed. What that did was, for the first time ever, make employing an illegal immigrant illegal. That was the point: Turn the magnet of jobs off. Before that, there was actually a loophole in the law that said Harboring an illegal immigrant is a crime—and it still is— but employing him does not count as “harboring.” It was called the “Texas Proviso”—not coincidentally—for, you know, growers who wanted illegal aliens working on their farms. That’s kind of what it amounted to. They got rid of that in 1986. The swap, the deal, was that the illegals who had been here before, or who had been here at least for four years, got amnesty. Sort of tie up the loose ends of the mistaken policies of the past, and go forward with a tighter system that will have fewer illegal immigrants: That was the theory. I wasn’t involved in politics at the time—in fact, I think I was in graduate school still—but, you know, it makes sense. We hadn’t done it before, it seemed like a plausible compromise.

The problem was, the amnesty all happened first—all

those people were processed—and the enforcement part never happened. So the magnet of jobs that was supposed to prevent future illegal immigration was never turned off. The low point was actually reached during President Bush’s, George W. Bush’s, term when, in 2004, in the entire United States, three employers were fined for hiring illegal immigrants. Not 3,000 or 300 or 30, but three, in the entire United States, were given fines for employing illegal immigrants. Well, it’s no surprise that it didn’t work, and now we have something like double or triple the number of illegal immigrants we had in 1986, 30 years ago. That failure is the reason we now have had—what is it, at least two or three major attempts at replaying that deal that have failed. This is why that McCain-Kennedy push back during W.’s administration to amnesty the illegal immigrants in exchange for promises of tightening up immigration, the reason it failed. It’s the reason Obama’s attempt—the “Gang of Eight” bill, you’ll remember back in 2013—it’s the reason that it passed the Senate, but ultimately it failed, because no one—no one—believes the politicians’ promises that “This time we’ll get serious, if only we amnesty all the illegal immigrants.”

Basically, what the House Republicans have been demanding—and, I think, what a lot of ordinary, non-political people in the public are demanding, or are saying—is that, “Okay, we can live with amnesty for people who have been here for a long time, and they’re not dope dealers or rapists. We get that. I don’t like it, but sometimes you have to deal with reality.

AIM in the News

page 2

To Vote in America

page 4

American Jobs

page 3

continued on page 3

By Don Irvine, Transcript by J. C. Hendershot

An Interview with Mark Krikorian of the Center for Immigration Studies

2 June-B 2011

Editor’s Message

in the News

A twice-monthly newsletter published by Accuracy in Media, Inc.

Editor: Roger Aronoff

4350 East West Highway #555Bethesda, MD 20814202-364-4401 | www.aim.orgPlease remember AIM in your will.

Your Letters

To the Editor: I contend that the truth has never been more in danger than what it is right now, with Obama, Hillary and all the liberal media fake news outlets added to social media where anything goes.Bruce

Please send Letters to the Editor to:Accuracy in MediaAttn: Letters to the Editor4350 East West Highway #555Bethesda, MD 20814or email to info@aim.org

Please keep your submissions to 50 wordsor less. Letters may be edited for length.

Judi McLeod is the editor of Canada Free Press (CanadaFree-Press.com). It’s a great publication, which has carried AIM’s columns for more than two decades, and AIM has often cited her work as well. McLeod was previously a col-umnist for the Toronto Sun.

In a recent column, titled, “Dump Susan Rice and Valerie Jarrett from membership in any govern-ment agency,” McLeod quoted ex-tensively from a column by Roger Aronoff. The column, “Susan Rice is the Wrong Person to Attack Trump’s Credibility,” criticized a column by Rice in The Washing-ton Post in which Rice “had the temerity to lecture President Don-ald Trump about telling the truth.”

Rice wrote that “our friends must be able to trust the word of the U.S. president,” to which McLeod com-mented, “Who could ever trust the likes of Susan Rice, Valerie Jarrett and other Obama o�cials?”

McLeod followed that with six paragraphs from Aronoff’s column, including this: “Yet Rice has the gall to lecture President Trump about truthfulness when she and Obama were caught telling numerous lies. It also shows the lengths that The Washington Post will go to in its constant campaign to discredit and undermine the Trump presidency.”

Dear Fellow Media Watchdogs: There is a lot of pessimism on the right, as President Trump continues to stumble, and progress on many fronts seems minimal, if at all. So far, repealing and replacing Obamacare has run into problems, as members of the Freedom Caucus have refused to go along with Obamacare-lite, as they see it. Tax reform, we are told, can’t take place until the healthcare issue is resolved. And what about the wall on our Southern border? Others are concerned with the extraordinary number of Obama holdovers in Trump’s

administration. Of course the media are determined to bring Trump down, one way or another. The constant barrage of negative stories about Trump, and everyone as-sociated with him, is unlike anything we’ve seen. And it’s not just the news media. The Hollywood Reporter ran an article about how even the scripted shows in prime time have become another hostile element in the War on Trump. Everything from Showtime’s “Homeland,” to CBS’s “Madam Secretary,” to HBO’s “Veep,” to ABC’s “Quantico” and “Scandal” have all adopted storylines that were clearly intended as criti-cism of Trump. And the late-night talk and comedy shows are over the top, competing to be the most hate-filled toward Trump. From my casual viewing, I would put Bill Maher (HBO) and Stephen Colbert at the front of the pack of mad-dog, over-the-top haters of Trump. It is common for them to compare Trump to Hitler, or Nazis, and Maher regularly refers to Trump’s two older sons as Uday and Qusay Hussein. They also regularly refer to Trump as a liar, without a whit of irony that they never accused Barack Obama of the same. I have documented so many of Obama’s lies—about Benghazi, the IRS scandal, Obamacare, the Iran deal, Fast and Furious, and his record on illegal immigration. That is just for starters. The love, praise and even worship of Obama by Hollywood, the news media and the late-night comedians is really quite stunning to behold. As we go to press, it is the morning after President Trump ordered the attack on an airbase in Syria. This is causing consternation in the media. Their natural reaction is to condemn Trump for flip-flopping, after frequently talking about staying out of this particular conflict. Or “wagging the dog.” Following the apparent chemical attack on civilians in Syria, in which we all saw the horrific images of children suf-fering, Trump’s mind was apparently changed. He partially blamed President Obama for failing to back up his “red line” retreat. Did Trump back himself into a corner when asked at the White House press conference, with the King of Jordan at his side, whether or not the attack in Syria had crossed any lines for him? He answered that it had crossed many lines. Many questions remain in my mind. Do we really know that this was the deliberate action of Syrian leader Bashar al Assad? Or could it have been a propaganda set-up by one of the many jihadist groups operating there? How deeply are we prepared to get involved? And on we go.•

For Accuracy in Media Roger Aronoff

2017 | XLVl-4

June-B 2011 3

But, only if it’s the last amnesty!” The whole point is, you need the enforcement stuff in place first, fully functioning—you know, working—before you even talk about tying up the loose ends. To use another metaphor, you have to turn the faucet off if your tub is overflowing, and then you worry about mopping up the floor. You don’t go mopping up the floor while the faucet is still pouring more water into the bathtub.

That kind of is the background, or the backstory, of the political wrangling over immigration. The folks on the Left, and some on the Libertarian and corporate Right, don’t want the enforcement to ever happen, whereas people—sort of, more immigration hawks, you know—can live with amnesty if they have to, but only after we fix the problem that created all the illegal immigration in the first place.

IRVINE: All right, so, on the enforcement side, what was the problem? Is it just, they were so rushed—they wanted to get this done, they thought this was the big cure-all, end-all—and they just didn’t really think it out? Did they not appropriate enough money for this? Did they not have enough staff on hand? What do you see as the problem on the enforcement side, going back to Simpson-Mazzoli?

KRIKORIAN: Politically, people didn’t want it to happen—I mean, they literally just didn’t. People—the corporate Right, and the ethnic-chauvinist Left—didn’t want it to happen, so they basically lied. They said, “Yeah, we’ll go along with the enforcement, sure, sure”—you know, cross our fingers behind our backs. In fact—and I’m not just imputing this, you know, reading into their motives—in 1990—so, this is four years after the bill passed, and, really, like three years after it started to go into effect—all the illegal aliens who were going to get amnesty, who were kind of in the pipeline—they at least had the provisional status, so the amnesty was pretty much mostly underway and over—what both Ted Kennedy and Orrin Hatch, and the National Council of La Raza tried to do was then welsh on the deal, and repeal the enforcement provision that said you couldn’t hire illegal immigrants anymore. In other words, they got theirs,

and wanted to welsh on the deal and not reciprocate. And they might have won except—believe it or not!—Coretta Scott King stopped them. This was a very different political environment, when there were some black leaders who said, “Yeah, this illegal immigration’s really bad for poor black people. Better-off black people, it doesn’t really matter, but for ordinary, blue-collar people of any kind—but disproportionately for black

Americans—this immigration thing’s really bad!” She actually took out an ad, and had an open letter and all this, saying, “No, we’re against getting rid of the ban on hiring illegal immigrants.” It’s the only reason that survived.

The problem is, even though it survived on the books, both the first Bush administration, and Clinton, and the second Bush administration didn’t follow up. They didn’t bother. In the Clinton administration, there was a really telling example. There was an immigration—he was like a regional director—out in the Midwest, and he said, “Look, we’re kind of doing this kabuki enforcement of what’s called ‘employer sanctions.’” That’s the shorthand term for the ban on hiring illegal immigrants. “We’re going into a restaurant, we’re arresting the illegal dishwashers, and then they just go across the street and get a job there, when we let them go. It’s not working. So,” he said, “let’s do something different. Let’s pick a whole industry—” so he went after the meat packing industry in-state, in Nebraska and in western Iowa—“and let’s not arrest anybody. Let’s just go and audit their books, all of them, all at once, and check the names in their personnel

records, and say, ‘Look, these people seem to be illegal. Maybe they’re not, maybe their stuff’s messed up, let’s come in for an interview, and if they’re legal we’ll fix it, and if they’re not, then they’re going to have to go.’” So, all those people didn’t show up. They all ran away, because they were all illegal. It was great! It was actually working! The police chief said, “Hey, this is really great! It’s working!” But every political and business person in Nebraska went bananas. The Governor, both Senators, all of this—and the guy, the INS guy who thought this up, was fired. That was pretty much the end of attempting to enforce the ban on hiring illegals, and that, really, is an important milestone in the mess we’re in today.

AMERICAN JOBS

IRVINE: Let me ask you this. One of the arguments made on this illegal immigration thing talks about the economic impact. We have a lot of people out there who say, “Well, if we send all these people back, who’s going to do all these jobs?” Then there are people who say, “The illegal aliens are taking a lot of jobs away!” What have you seen in all the things that you’ve been studying?

KRIKORIAN: There’s no question that illegal immigrants get jobs. It’s not like a one-to-one thing, an illegal alien comes here, he gets a job, and an American loses it. That’s not the way economies work. But there’s no question that large shares of our workforce are, in fact, in competition—not just with illegal immigrants, but legal immigrants, too. In fact, there are more legal immigrants than there are illegal. This is especially true with regard to—how do I put it?—

continued on page 4

continued from page 1

2017 | XLVl-4

Politically, people didn’t want it to happen...People—the corporate Right, and the ethnic-chauvinist Left—didn’t want it to happen, so they basically lied.

4 June-B 2011continued on page 5

continued from page 3

2017 | XLVl-4

less desirable, less mainstream parts of our workforce. Young people—teenagers, for instance, teenagers have been working less and less over the years, even in states with little immigration, that’s true, but the drop in teenage employment is much steeper, much worse, in places with more immigration—less-skilled American workers, adults who don’t have high school diplomas—or even if they only have high school—and, again, even ex-cons. If you’re an ex-con, you’re looking for a job, a lot of employers are going to say “Well, you know, I don’t really want to hire this guy.” When the labor market is tight—meaning, with less immigrations—employers are going to be more willing to take a chance on you. Okay, look: Half the ex-cons they hire may be dirt-bags—but what about the other half? That other half doesn’t get a chance when there’s this unending flow of immigrant workers. So, basically, what immigration does—high immigrations—is, it loosens the labor market—that’s how they talk about it—so that there’s more people chasing fewer jobs. What that does is put the employers in the driver’s seat instead of in a tight labor market, where the employees or the job seekers can say, “Look, you know I’d love to take your job, but I’m going to need fifty cents an hour more, and, you know, something else.” In a tight labor market, the guy looking for a job is in a better position to make that kind of request.

TO VOTE IN AMERICAIRVINE: Okay. Another thing, too,

that comes up is the discussion about the impact of immigration on our political system—the number of people who wind up voting, and things like that. I am not the expert as to how the voting is handled on a state-by-state basis because every state has different rules. What have you seen there in terms of immigration’s impact—illegal immigration’s impact—on voting?

KRIKORIAN: Yeah, I think some people either exaggerate or misun-derstand the problem. Not a lot of illegal aliens voted. It does—I’m sure it happens. There are probably more legal immigrants who aren’t citizens yet who are voting. Often that happens by mistake. They’re not rocket—they’re

not college graduates for the most part, they’re not PhD’s. The DMV gives them a piece of paper when they go to get a license, to register—

IRVINE: Right.

KRIKORIAN: They don’t know what the fine print says. It’s like, “Well, the government gave me this paper, I want to do the right thing, I’m going to fill it out.” So the problem here, that’s more on us, rather than some plot, George Soros is trying to screw up the election. But, that having been said, mass immigration does change the political balance of power, because it does import Democratic voters. The problem is not illegal voters so much, it’s all the legal voters that immigration has created, who are perfectly—there’s no reason—there’s nothing wrong with them, plenty of Americans who were born here vote Left. But immigrants, almost by

definition, are more likely to lean Left. They’re less educated, therefore they’re more likely to be supporting government programs, taxpayer-funded programs. There’s an enormous amount of research on this, showing that immigrants are disproportionately Big Government liberals. That’s just the way it is. The Left is intentionally using that as a way of changing the political culture of the United States. It seems to me the Right has at least got to say, “How about we put the brakes on this, and let Americans decide what the political future of the country is going to be?”

IRVINE: It seems to me that, with

the large number of Hispanics, Latinos, that come in and vote, and eventually qualify for voting and other things like that, they tend to vote Democrat—but yet, a large part of those people, they’re Catholic! It would seem on the surface—they would be more pro-life.

KRIKORIAN: There are a couple of reasons. First, survey data shows that the views of immigrants really aren’t that different from those of Americans: They’re not that socially conservative. Hispanic immigrants, who make up a half, little more of a half, of the foreign-born, are, in fact, slightly more pro-life, but the difference isn’t huge. Asian immigrants are actually slightly less pro-life, and they’re not quite half, but they are the next-biggest share of immigrants. So, first of all, it doesn’t completely cancel out, but mostly it does. But also, there’s survey research that suggests immigrants are actually less likely to vote based on social concerns, as opposed to economic ones. Even though, on average, immigrants, when you put them all together, are probably a couple of ticks socially more conservative—not very much, but maybe a little bit—it matters a lot less to them in the voting booth. That’s why you don’t see what you’re suggesting. A lot of people say, “They’re Catholic, why are they voting Democrat?” Well, you know, Nancy Pelosi’s a Catholic!

IRVINE: You talk about the economic thing. My wife is Korean, and she’s probably even more conservative than I am on a lot of issues. One thing that always gets her is how many Koreans she knows vote Democrat—and yet a lot of them are small business owners. You look at it and say, “Republicans are good for small businesses and lower taxes and all these kinds of things,” but it’s almost like they vote in lockstep with the Democratic Party.

KRIKORIAN: Yeah. Like I said, there’s a lot to that. There’s more detail, for anybody who wants it—Eagle Forum’s website has an extensive report where they basically just put together the research, the public opinion research, on this. It’s really illuminating.

IRVINE: All right. You mentioned

There’s an enormous amount of research on this, showing that im-migrants are disproportionately Big Government liberals. That’s just the way it is.

June-B 2011 5

continued from page 4

2017 | XLVl-4continued on page 6

a little about some of the other administrations. What’s your view, in terms of—we go past Simpson-Mazzoli—when you look at the Bush administrations, and Clinton, and even through Obama? How do you rate immigration policy under those administrations?

KRIKORIAN: They’re all bad, pretty much, except the last year and a half of W.’s administration—they actually started to get serious. The reason is, his attempt to push an amnesty failed. He came into office intending to do the same kind of “Gang of Eight” thing that Obama wanted to do. In fact, the Mexican President, Vicente Fox, came and visited Washington, and he and Bush, in 2001, were strategizing on how to get an amnesty passed in Congress. Unfortunately, that was the Friday before 9/11. So that put the kibosh on all of those things. Bush kept trying. When he failed, in 2007 through 2008, they actually started to get serious. Now, Bush didn’t change his mind, it’s just that they realized, “Oh, I get it: Nobody believes us about enforcement! We have to show that we’re serious about enforcement!” So you had about a year and a half of real improvements—and then you had Obama. His eight years of gutting immigration law enforcement, I think, is one of the things that paved the way for Trump.

IRVINE: All right. Now, we are going to talk about Trump in the remaining time that we’ve got. Obviously, with this executive order that has been issued, you’ve been very busy talking to the media about that. How do you see all of this going here? Originally, I wanted to talk to you about what happens—how is immigration going to look under a Trump administration, are we going to

build the wall?—but we need to talk about the executive orders as well, so I’m going to give you that free reign.

KRIKORIAN: Sure. He’s so far issued three executive orders on immigration. Two of them were on enforcement, specifically. One is on border issues—this is where he’s talked about the wall, but there’s more in it there—and the other, on interior enforcement. This is stepping up deportations of people involved in crime, that kind of thing. The most recent one, which caused all the ruckus at the airports, was about refugees and travel from the Middle East—a more security-related element of it. They’re all a good start, in my opinion. But they’re just a start. Only a few parts of these various orders are going to result in an immediate change. One thing, for instance, in the border order was to end what they call “catch and release.” If the border patrol catches somebody, under Obama—and this was testified, in Congress, to by the head of the border patrol agents’ union—more than 80% of everybody arrested at the border, by the border patrol, is let go into the United States. 80%! T h e y give them some paper—you know, “Show up for a hearing seven years from now” or something like that—and that’s the end of it. And they never do! So they’re gone! So that ends—that is the kind of thing that will end immediately. But a lot of the rest of it is really just the kick-off for the kind of changes that are necessary. You don’t just sign a paper and make things happen. You’ve got to invest more in detention facilities, you’ve got to do all kinds of stuff like that, so it’s going to take time. Overall, the start has been good, although it’s been kind of clumsy, especially with this latest one: They didn’t do enough preparation with the refugee thing. But it’s a learning curve, you know what I mean? Overall, I’m pretty encouraged. Let’s see if the follow-through ends up being as good as it seems.

IRVINE: All right, so, Trump, during the campaign, kept talking about The Wall. “The Wall—

KRIKORIAN: Right.

IRVINE: “—We’re going to build a Great Wall! It’s going to be, like, the Greatest Wall! It’s going to be this great big—”

KRIKORIAN: Right.

IRVINE: “—door!” We heard all kinds of interesting things there. I will admit that I am a huge skeptic about all of that—

KRIKORIAN: Right.

IRVINE: —going in. But, he did sign this order. What are the odds, though, that we get any kind of a wall? How necessary is that? And Mexico paying for it, this whole tariff idea? What—

KRIKORIAN: Right. Yeah, the Mexico—

IRVINE: —are your thoughts about all this?

KRIKORIAN: —paying for it thing, I don’t know even know where that came from. It’s kind of silly. But, what I think is actually valuable is the idea of illegal immigrants paying for the wall. I mean, in a sense, that’s actually kind of appropriate. That’s something—this tariff thing is dumb because that’s just a tax on us. That’s not making Mexico pay for anything, that’s making us—

IRVINE: Right.

KRIKORIAN: —pay for it. If we’re going to pay for it, just levy a regular tax, it’d just come out of the Treasury. But Oklahoma, it points the way: Oklahoma has a state tax on wire transfers out of state—including remittances. But you get 100% of it back when you file your state tax return, which you have to have a Social Security number to do. So a national tax like that—say, a one or two percent on wire transfers out of the United States—and giving you 100% credit when you file your tax return, would actually generate—it wouldn’t be

6 June-B 2011

$1 billion a year, but it would be a lot of money, and over several years it would be enough to do the kind of border enforcement stuff he wants to do.

Now, the wall. Is it going to be amazing? Is it going to be like the Great Wall of China, where tourists are going to go and walk on top? No. We already have hundreds of miles of fencing. Some of it is good fencing. Some of it is Mickey Mouse fencing to keep cars from driving over. I’ve been on them. I’ve hopped over them and climbed onto them. I have pictures of myself clowning around on it. The real pedestrian fence—fourteen, fifteen, whatever, feet high—it’s hard to clown around on that one. There might be a second layer behind it—you need, really, two layers for a fence to really work, and a road in between for the border patrol. So there’s going to be improvements at the border. It’s not all going to be concrete wall, but if he does a creditable job of hardening border enforcement—and, also, the other things we need, because, frankly, the border fencing and wall and all that stuff, for me, is actually lower priority than some other things—if he actually follows through and does that stuff consistently, I don’t think people are going to care that it’s not cement here, it’s metal, and there’s ten miles here with no wall, because in some places you don’t really need anything—the terrain makes it impossible, really, to cross. Like I said, if he follows through and does a creditable job, I don’t think people are going to care if it’s 2,000 miles long, or 1,000 miles, or whatever.

IRVINE: Are you in favor, then? I saw that he wants to add, what, 5,000 border patrol agents. Will that help the situation, really?

KRIKORIAN: Yeah, I think it will. Now, my only caution there is, don’t hire people too quickly. Don’t water the standards down just to meet a quota, because they did that under Bush, and they ended up hiring some people that were—they watered down the standards. Just as one example: There used to be—a lot of Mexican-Americans make it into the border patrol, because you need to know—it’s a requirement to speak Spanish. A lot of them, even if their Spanish isn’t great, they at least

know enough, and then they take classes and they’re much more likely to pass that. So something like a third of the border patrol is Mexican-American, or at least some kind of Latino—there’s some Puerto Ricans and others. Well, that’s fine, except, the old rule used to be, if you were from one of the border towns, you were never stationed in that area, because you might well have relatives on the other side of the river—people the cartels can blackmail, and all of that. So they would move you. You’d be stationed other places. Well, that became a problem when they were trying to ramp

up massive numbers of people, so they got rid of that. Well, guess what? There’s now more corruption in the border patrol, because now they can manipulate or blackmail relatives on the other side of the border. That’s a long way of saying I’m for increasing staffing, but the goal needs to be to maintain the standards, not just meet hiring quotas.

KRIKORIAN: Extreme vetting is the point. Absolutely.

IRVINE: So, what do you think is going to happen here? You’ve really been in the thick of all this executive order thing, particularly with this travel ban. As you mentioned, these protests at the airports, there’s this mass movement—we had the Hollywood liberals at the Screen Actors Guild give all these speeches bashing Trump—is any of that going to come to anything, from the Left side of things?

KRIKORIAN: I don’t think so. First of all, these aren’t “travel bans,” they’re just pauses—temporary. There’s a 120-day pause in bringing refugees, and a 90-day pause for anybody coming fromthose seven dangerous countries. Thepoint is, give a breather so you can lookunder the hood and see if we need tobe doing anything else. By the time allof these Hollywood drama queens getaround to doing anything, it’s going tobe over. I mean, this is very limited. This

isn’t some “Muslim ban” that he was talking about. When he talked about that in the campaign, that was sort of an “Archie Bunker-ism.” That’s the way I think about it—you know, you’re at a bar at the end of the day, you’re driving your truck, you’re looking at the news and you’re saying, “We need to keep these damned Muslims out!” Well, that’s if you’re in a bar—

IRVINE: Yeah.

KRIKORIAN:—and you drive a truck, and it’s after a long day. That’s not the way you make policy. They’ve made something—or at least, they’re groping toward actual, constructive policy-making. There’s more involved, but it seems to me a perfectly plausible first step.

IRVINE: What about the media’s role in all of this?

KRIKORIAN: The media—I think Stephen Bannon is right: The media really is the opposition party. We’ve gotten to the point where the media is—the Democratic Party’s publicity organ is the mainstream media. The New York Times and the rest of them, they’re just going bonkers. After two years of this campaign, where they’ve completely de-legitimized themselves, I’m not sure it really changes the politics of it, that the media’s hair is on fire about what Trump is doing. If he actually, you know, follows through, and we see some results from some of these promises—the number of illegals shrinks some, as it should be—the economy picks up a little bit—that’s a lot of it, a big part of it, too—all of this is just going to be background noise, it seems to me.

IRVINE: Great! I appreciate it. This was fabulous. This was so educational. I really appreciate you taking the time to come and visit us today. We’ll be back with a regular edition of The Bias Buzz podcast. Thanks a lot!

Don Irvine Chairman of

Accuracy in Media

2017 | XLVl-4

continued from page 6

Now, the wall. Is it going to be amazing? Is it going to be like the Great Wall of China, where tourists are going to go and walk on top? No. We already have hundreds of miles of fencing.