Strange but true: even in the smallest newsrooms today, even during the #Me Too era, a sexual predator catches a break from the media if he happens to be an illegal alien.
The newsrooms in question are those of WIBW, a Topeka radio station, and the Holton Recorder, a newspaper in the small northeast Kansas town of Holton. To their credit, these were the only two newsrooms to find it newsworthy that the sexual predator in question, Antonio Ramirez-Garcia, was sentenced to 32 months in prison on Friday for for sexually assaulting a former co-worker in Holton.
To their discredit, each newsroom yielded to the dictates of the PC thought police and buried the lead. WIBW ran the oddly compromising headline “Man from Mexico sentenced for Jackson Co. sexual assault.”
The Holton Recorder ran a story before the guilty plea was entered headlined, “Ramirez-Garcia Rape Case to Go to Trial in August.” Recorder reporter Brian Sanders made no reference to Ramirez-Garcia’s legal status referring to him as “a resident of southern Mexico” as off-handedly as he might have said “a resident of southern Missouri.”
Curiously, in February, WIBW was much more forthcoming, if still more polite than need be. Its headline then was “Undocumented immigrant arrested after Jackson Co. [Kansas] rape.” According to the article, sheriff’s deputies “tracked” Ramirez-Garcia to Topeka where he was arrested and charged with a single count of rape.
In the final sentence of the short article, the reader learns, “The Jackson Co. Sheriff’s Office says Ramirez-Garcia, whose hometown is listed as Oaxaca, in southern Mexico, is in the country illegally.”
One would think that in August, with illegal immigration being a critical issue in the state’s upcoming elections, editors would find the immigration status of a now convicted sexual predator more relevant not less, but to think that is to misunderstand the American media, even the tiny rural American media.