The Center for Immigration Studies is an innocuous-sounding name for an anti-immigrant hate group that should never be quoted on immigration stories, yet a new report has found that major newspapers, including The New York Times and The Washington Post, regularly do quote it. “Over 90% of the time,” Define American and the MIT Center for Civic Media said, CIS “was referenced as a neutral information source for expert opinion or data without contextualizing the group’s extremist ties or its relationship with the Trump administration.” Those ties are long and well-documented.
Founded by eugenicist John Tanton, CIS has been designated a hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center (CIS unsuccessfully challenged this in court just recently), and “has a decades-long history of circulating racist writers, while also associating with white nationalists.” Tanton himself once said, “I’ve come to the point of view that for European-American society and culture to persist requires a European-American majority, and a clear one at that.”
CIS should never be quoted or cited by media, unless it’s in the context of a story on its hateful record. Yet major papers, which also include the Los Angeles Times and USA Today, keep doing it, the report says. In fact, its compilers found that “dehumanizing terms in the four papers studied increased from 2014 to 2018 ...The Washington Post and The New York Times had a higher percentage of stories with denigrating terms than a broad collection of U.S. national sources.”
There are real-life consequences to elevating dehumanizing language, when the rhetoric of the president of the United States is no different than the rhetoric of a white supremacist terrorist gunman who targeted Latinos in El Paso, Texas—and the media has an obligation not to aid this. Define American writes, “The Associated Press, the Society for Professional Journalism, and style guides across the industry encourage reporters and editors to use humanizing and accurate language when referring to people.”
These policies came about only because activists have pushed for them, so be vigilant and remember the names Center for Immigration Studies, Federation of American Immigration Reform, and NumbersUSA (two other Tanton-affiliated groups); and next time you spot an outlet citing them seriously, say something. “At a time when we are jailing children, when white supremacists are killing Americans because they think they might be immigrants, and when hate crimes are at an all-time high, journalists must do better,” Define American said.
