Friday, 16 October 2009 02:20
Federation for American Immigration Reform - FairUS.org
The Media Department at the Federation for American Immigration Reform has just published a "Guide to Understanding the Tactics of the Southern Poverty Law Center in the Immigration Debate." (See Guide). The guide was designed to help journalists better understand the unscrupulous methods used by the SPLC to discredit organizations, like FAIR, and to attack the American people who support enforcing the immigration laws already on the books and oppose efforts to pass a mass-amnesty for illegal aliens. (See FAIR's Press Release, October 2, 2009).
As FAIR's Press Release highlighted, the key conclusions of the report were:
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The SPLC has no self-avowed immigration policy expertise yet they exploit the current national debate to increase fundraising. Their inflammatory charges against FAIR and others are politically driven, factually distorted, and wildly exaggerated for the purpose of making their mission more urgent in order to raise vast sums of money.
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Third party analysis by The Nation, Harpers, and even the SPLC's hometown newspaper, the Montgomery Advertiser, all came to the same conclusion; the SPLC is a self-propagating fundraising machine with little regard for the truth.
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SPLC offers no objective criteria for their "hate group" designations nor is there any basis in fact to their claim that hate crimes are rising due to the immigration debate.
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When writing about the immigration issue, journalists have an obligation to test the accuracy of the SPLC's information, question their motives, seek out responses to their allegations, and clearly distinguish between advocacy and news reporting.
On Thursday, October 8, 2009, FAIR's Media Director, Bob Dane, participated in an interview with Accuracy in Media. (to listen, click here, beginning at 38:30 in the broadcast).
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