Conservative critics like to carp about the New York Times and National Public Radio being woefully out of touch with, oh, about half the country. Events over the weekend demonstrate why those criticisms, while often tedious, continue to have merit.
Consider: In his current quest to out-Trump Trump, Ted Cruz has begun referring to illegal immigrants as “undocumented Democrats.” This is hardly an original epithet; the phrase has been a staple of the Rush Limbaugh program for at least five years. (The joke migrated to a Jay Leno monologue in 2013 as well.) If there’s any story here, it’s that Cruz is making a strategic decision to appeal to dittoheads by lifting Rush’s language. That is significant insofar as while Limbaugh has not endorsed Trump, he has tended to be very, very friendly towards the real estate mogul on his radio show.
Yet according to the New York Times and NPR, Cruz invented the phrase out of whole cloth. The Texas senator has “has coined a new phrase, ‘undocumented Democrats,’ to describe those in the country illegally,” reported the Times on Sunday. “Ted Cruz has coined a new term in the fight over immigration: ‘undocumented Democrats,” NPR reported a couple of days earlier. (Headline: “‘Undocumented Democrat’ is Ted Cruz’s ‘New, Politically Correct’ Term.”)
OK, so perhaps it’s too much to ask for Times and NPR reporters to listen to Rush regularly, though given that he remains a singular figure on the right, it would certainly bolster their reporting if they tuned in every now and again. But this is a revealing episode, in that it shows how little many in the mainstream media understand about the American right. This isn’t an example of journalists consciously skewing a story; rather, these two reporters at two of the most prestigious news organizations in the United States were simply unaware of the term, because they know nothing of Limbaugh, a massive success whose ratings are roughly on-par with Morning Edition. (Nor, apparently, do they know much about googling; had either reporter simply searched the term “undocumented Democrat,” they would have seen that Cruz hardly invented it. Indeed, Iowa congressman Steve King, who has endorsed Cruz, used the term in an interview this spring.) And by the way, when Cruz perhaps takes it a step further and starts referring to “Anchor Democrats,” know that he didn’t invent that term either.
Update: NPR has corrected the item.
