Subtle pro-illegal immigration bias in the media

Note sent to the PBS news show Washington Week:

In this week's reportage Charles Babington told Gwen Ifil that the public favored amnesty a lot more when it wasn't called amnesty. The smiles and body language of all strongly implied that the public was just fine with giving illegal aliens citizenship and benefits as long as it was worded correctly without prejudicial terms.

I have a degree in sociology from UCLA and over 20 years' experience in publishing, including interpreting polls, and IMO this issue is not nearly so cut and dried as you indicated it to be.
I regularly read the NY Times, Washington Post, and the LA Times, as well as some local papers, and all of their editorial pages tirelessly promote amnesty for illegal aliens. That's their prerogative, but their news reportage promotes amnesty more subtly--as I believe this interchange did.

The most common form of covert promotion consists of presenting human interest stories about noble illegals who just want to work. Each is true and accurate as far as it goes, but it creates a false context around illegal immigration, neglecting the rapidly growing problem of transnational gangs such as MS-13, human and drug trafficking, widespread ID theft, and plausible estimates that undereducated illegal immigrants and their kin consume vastly more in social services than their unskilled labor ever puts into the economy--and that a new amnesty will plant a time bomb in the social security and Medicare systems that will go off in twenty years and wreak havoc in those systems and our economies.

The other bias that appears outside the editorial pages is a complete lack of focus on the fact that these people didn't drop out of the sky. Every one of them is a citizen of some other country--and it's that country we all should be tackling when it comes to alleviating their poverty and need for social services.

Lastly, other than proximity, why Latin Americans? Mexico is only 53 on the UN poverty index. If we want to help those in need, shouldn't we help the neediest? That would be the citizens of Niger (177), the Darfur, or the two million Iraqis who are now refugees thanks to us. If we want to benefit America, we should be fast-tracking educated, English-speaking, middle class immigrants of every race and country. Simple proximity, unlike these alternatives, is based on no principle at all--just convenience.

Instead of talking about any of this we get target fixation on the current plight of today's illegals. I'm not discounting this but I urge you to consider the long-term implications and greater context that I've outlined here.

And I put it to you that the more adverse public reaction to calling it amnesty could be a more accurate reaction to more accurate language, while not calling it amnesty is deceptively euphemizing it. And believe me, to the illegals themselves, anything whatsoever that lets them stay here legally--with or without citizenship--means amnesty to them. And it's their understanding of the term that counts most, doesn't it?

You don't have to agree with all this. What I do want you to agree with is that presenting it the way you did embodied the implied presumption that Babington's pro-amnesty interpretation of the facts was the only one possible. It was not, and I'm not parsing words to say so.

I know Gwen Ifil prides herself on her objectivity and fair-mindedness, and I hold up Washington Week in Review to my right-wing friends as an exemplar of unbiased reporting. Please don't disappoint me in this area.