Katie Couric, the perky Lou Dobbs

[Amerigo Vespucci]

Latinos outraged over CBS report
By GEBE MARTINEZ | 4/29/08 8:14 PM EST

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0408/9952.html

As if Katie Couric didn’t already have enough problems. Weighed down by record-low ratings at the anchor desk of “CBS Evening News,” and by reports suggesting she will leave that post two years before her multimillion-dollar contract expires, Couric now has civil rights groups — mostly Hispanic — on her back. And for good reason.

The CBS newscast that carries her name recently aired a one-sided and inaccurate report about illegal immigrant women who give birth to their children in the United States. The news story challenged the broader constitutional law of birthright citizenship and stated — without providing the correct context — that the births cost U.S. taxpayers millions of dollars annually.

The story’s central figure was a woman identified as an illegal immigrant, who was lying in her South Texas hospital bed — her right arm wrapped around her newborn and her left hand punctured by an intravenous needle — while reporter Byron Pitts lectured her that “many Americans who struggle to take care of their own families think it is unfair that they should have to take care” of non-U.S. citizens.

Immigrant advocates found the report so crass, and so far below the network’s journalistic standards set by legends Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite, that they accused Couric of sinking to the depths of Lou Dobbs, the CNN broadcaster and contributor to CBS’s “The Early Show” who has inflamed national anti-immigrant sentiment. One Hispanic group posted on its website a photo of Couric that morphs into Dobbs.

[RB TexLa]

1. I have never understood how communities can look at a birth as a cost.

a citizen is born, if indigent yes government pays some money for the birth. Then diapers, food, and all the baby stuff is bought and sales tax is paid. The child is housed somewhere causing property taxes to be paid. Then the child grows up, enters the workforce and begins paying income taxes, some much more than others. Also they are still paying all other taxes and fees to the government.

A person giving birth is not an overall negative cost to the taxpayers.

[MadAndy]

2. Unless the person ends up on public assistance so that all those items, food, rent,

medical services are provided by govt. funds.

[RB TexLa]

3. But look at the percentages, the citizens born to undocumented immigrants would much more than

pay for the ones who end up on assistance and still provide a net return.

[Warpy]

5. That usually happens when they DON'T get timely care

Face it, even those food stamps and welfare checks get spent and help keep merchants and producers of goods and services employed.

No rich man ever handed out a job unless he had a lot of poor men standing around with money in their pockets, looking for the goods or services that job would provide.

The consumer economy runs from the bottom up and the sooner you cast off that elitist supply side crap, the sooner you'll be on the way to realizing just what has gone wrong here and how to fix it.

[MadAndy]

7. So basically your ideal economic scheme is for the consumer to be a

middleman to transfer govt money to the shopkeeper. And dont forget the benefits of having large numbers of people on assistance which provides many jobs to govt workers.

[Warpy]

8. Don't you know the "SO" rule?

Anything that follows is a strawman.

The genius of the New Deal was that it did scrape money off the very top in the form of confiscatory tax rates and recirculate it at the bottom. The result was the best deal that working people in this country had ever had, and the longest sustained boom that any country had ever experienced.

The liberal economy was the only one that ever managed to work for the largest number of people over the longest period of time. Only the oil shock inflation of the 70s that pushed people of modest means into the tax brackets aimed at the rich allowed the right wing to end it.

Is it working for us? Is it working for you?

[MadAndy]

9. Your "So rule" is BS and lame excuse for evading a question. Better luck next time.

[Mountainman]

6. There is also perinatal care.

I work for the county and here is what we do. We have a place in each of the surrounding 3 cities. Anyone can walk in and begin to get treated for alcohol and drug abuse and perinatal services. There are no citizenship requirements. If the person is eligible for state funded insurance they get it if not the county picks up the tab. It costs the tax payer plenty but the effects of not taking care of these people also costs in medical and legal costs.

[Supersedeas]

10. odd how the cost is nominal and the life so precious when the same group rally round the abortion

issue

[SpiralHawk]

4. A Perky Propagandist Pixie

Taking journalism down to ever more twisted levels with the other corporate news spokesmodels.

Republicons...Ptoooey.