Media, black leadership betray black Americans during immigration crisis

 As a young reporter in Chicago during the 1960s, I watched as that city's media that included four major newspapers fell all over themselves defending blacks who were demanding nothing more than the rights they were born with.

Covering this issue could be dangerous, especially during the riots following Martin Luther King's 1968 assassination.  At the Chicago Daily News where I worked, the "leg man" for columnist Mike Royko found himself in the wrong place at the wrong time and was severely beaten.  Fortunately, as I recall, a black man came to his rescue and removed him from a situation that could have been a lot worse.

But where are the media today when blacks find themselves being hurt the most by an immigration policy that is contributing to their 13.5 percent unemployment rate?  Why no challenge from our nation's newsrooms about why our federal government has refused to enforce its own laws and a Congress that seems bent on flooding this country with even more legal foreign workers and granting amnesty to 11 million illegals in our presence?

It is going to be interesting to see how much ink and air time the mainstream media give to the July 15 March for Jobs in Washington, D.C.. that is being sponsored by the Black American Leadership Alliance.  Will there be equal time given to blacks and others whose own search for a better life has been postponed by a years-long flood of immigrants with few skills and little education who directly compete with the most vulnerable members of our society?

Will today's reporters - and their editors - fill their pages and broadcasts with the faces of these American citizens who have been betrayed by their own government?  Will members of Congress have microphones pushed in their faces and asked to defend their support for fixing a "broken" immigration that they and they alone helped to break?  Most importantly, will the media have the presence of mind to ask Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, the NAACP and the Congressional Black Caucus why they remained silent while immigration pushed blacks back to the back of the political, economic and social bus?

Or is this a question that falls into the realm of critical thinking that for years has been  uncharted waters for most American journalists?