On Thursday, March 19, an 18-year-old college student at Loyola University in Chicago named Sheridan Gorman was allegedly shot dead by an illegal alien from Venezuela, Jose Medina. The networks could barely touch the story, or talk about the immigration status of the alleged shooter. CBS only spent two minutes, followed by ABC at 79 seconds and NBC at 23 seconds. Searching for it on PBS or NPR found nothing.
PBS stations did waste 90 minutes on a documentary titled, “White With Fear,” about how Republicans use overtly racist tactics to win elections, and one of those, they claimed, was highlighting violent crimes by illegal immigrants. Their primary example was conservatives reporting on the 2015 killing of Kate Steinle in San Francisco.
The networks hate reporting on crime committed by illegal immigrants. They would insist it’s atypical. They love to proclaim that illegal immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than native-born Americans – if you’re willing to dismiss the crime of entering the country illegally or overstaying a visa. But this ignores the obvious logic for grieving families like Gorman’s – if the alleged illegal alien killer hadn’t been allowed into the country, their loved one would still be alive.
Gorman’s family put out a statement about their loss and the politics of it: “Sheridan’s death cannot be reduced to a general ‘tragedy,’ nor can it be explained away by broad references to failures somewhere else,” the family said. “We are not interested in political arguments or in watching responsibility shift from one place to another. If there were failures—as the Governor [J.B. Pritzker] himself has acknowledged—then every one of them must be identified, examined, and addressed directly.”
Hellbound and Down 