Yesterday the Los Angeles Times ran a story (”A Job Americans Won’t Do, Even at $34 an Hour“) that featured information and quotes from a business owner described as “ambivalent on immigration reform.” This turns out to be a serious misrepresentation and the truth undermines the validity of the story–not that many people will believe that you can’t fill $34/hour jobs.

It turns out the focus of the story is anything but ambivalent.

Per Michelle Malkin:

Cyndi Smallwood is president of the Orange County chapter of the California Landscape Contractors Association, and is a member of the association’s “Immigration Task Force.” The activist group opposes the “Punitive Immigration Reform Bill Proposed by Rep. Sensenbrenner.”

To call her ambivalent when she is a member of an immigration activist group is an out-and-out falsehood. While one might consider it just more Times’ sloppiness, it is hard to imagine that they didn’t know this and the article was agenda-driven from the outset. Smallwood traveled to Washington in March on a pro-immigration visit and was quoted in the Sacramento Bee, the Orange County Register and other news outlets. (Remember this is the person that the Times said was “ambivalent on immigration reform.”) It is as if they quoted an executive of a cigarette company on an article about the dangers of smoking without noting their employment.

For the record:

This afternoon Cyndi was on [a local talk radio show called] the “John and Ken Show.” She told them that since the article appeared in the LA Times this morning she has received over 30 resumes. Yep, 30 resumes in just a few short hours for a job Americans won’t do. Cyndi may want to re-think her not-so-hi-tech word of mouth advertising campaign.

John and Ken took some calls from the audience. Cyndi, who seems like a nice lady, appeared to get flustered that everyone who called in wanted the job.

Update: Patterico has been rebuffed by the Times for a correction or clarification to the above story (which Micky Kaus calls “an edifice of PC hackery!”). Once again the Times looks defensive, silly and out of touch.

tags: immigration los angeles times LA Times

This entry was posted on Friday, May 19th, 2006 at 2:28 pm by Insider and is filed under Los Angeles Times. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.