The worst woke excesses may be receding in corporate America, but they still enjoy a secure place in big-box media circles. In what reads like a parody of professional journalism standards, the National Association of Hispanic Journalists (NAHJ) has released revised guidelines for reporters that feature an emphasis on defending illegal aliens in the era of the Trump administration’s mass deportations.
“With immigration perpetually at the forefront of U.S. political discourse, it’s more important than ever for journalists to know how to cut through the noise and report with accuracy, context, and humanity,” NAHJ member Patricia Guadalupe, former head of the organization’s Washington, DC, chapter, wrote in an article posted Oct. 29 at Nieman Reports, a publication of Harvard’s Nieman Foundation for Journalism.
With “more than 4,000” members nationwide, NAHJ “has addressed this challenge with the newly updated 2025 edition of its Cultural Competence Handbook, a comprehensive resource for covering immigration and the complex identity issues intertwined with it,” Guadalupe continued. It is quite explicit about its intentions to promote pro-illegal alien coverage among journalists.
Plug and Play for PC Media
Guadalupe gushed about the potential for journalists to query the handbook via ChatGPT. “Imagine a reporter crafting a prompt such as: ‘I’m covering a breaking story about [a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement] operation at a local workplace. How do I report on this accurately and ethically – without endangering undocumented individuals, spreading panic, repeating law enforcement talking points uncritically, or exposing myself to legal risk?’” she wrote. “The handbook is now equipped to provide immediate, ethical guidance.”
The NAHJ guidebook is chock-full of the usual leftist social babble straight out of the Black Lives Matter era, when the wokeness wave was at its zenith.
NAHJ “recommends capitalizing ‘Black’ when referring to people, culture, or communities,” the handbook states. “NAHJ does not recommend capitalizing ‘white.’ While ‘Black’ has been adopted as a reflection of a shared cultural identity and community, ‘white’ generally has not, as capitalizing ‘white’ can inadvertently reflect or legitimize the language of white supremacist groups, which often capitalize it intentionally.”
But it is immigration that captures the most attention in the guidebook.
‘Improper Entry Is a Misdemeanor’
“Phrases such as ‘illegal immigrant’ and ‘illegal alien’ replace complex and ever-changing legal circumstances with an unspecified assumption of guilt,” the handbook proclaims. “Living in the US without legal authorization (unlawful presence) is a civil offense, while improper entry (crossing the border) is a misdemeanor. It should be noted that because many undocumented immigrants initially arrived legally, they have not committed a crime.”
This sort of naked agenda dressed up as a quality standard might be humorous until one realizes the real standing NAHJ has within the big-box media orbit.
An NAHJ “Partners” page on the organization’s website is exhaustive. Current “NAHJ Champions” include the Columbia Journalism School and multinational banking behemoth JPMorgan Chase. Is there an ethical issue with 4,000+ Hispanic journalists being sponsored by a bank? The handbook is quiet on that question.
A lengthy list of “Previous National Corporate Partners” to NAHJ includes ABC News, CBS News, NBCUniversal, Facebook, the Los Angeles Times, and The Wall Street Journal.
How problematic is it that a Hispanic journalism organization proudly supporting illegal aliens holds such sway among the dominant media? Let’s cite one example.
‘Latina Journalist of the Year’ in Action
CBS’ 60 Minutes correspondent Cecilia Vega was honored last December as the 2024 NAHJ “National Latina Journalist of the Year.” The 2025 edition of the annual awards gala is being held this month. Sponsors include Comcast NBCUniversal and The New York Times.
This would be the same Cecilia Vega who garnered national headlines around that time for her attempts to stage a “gotcha” 60 Minutes interview with Tom Homan, who currently serves as President Donald Trump’s border czar.
“We have seen one estimate that says it would cost $88 billion to deport a million people a year,” Vega asserted to Homan in the guise of a question. She then went on to ask him, “Is there a way to carry out mass deportation without separating families?”
Homan was nonplussed. “Of course there is. Families can be deported together,” he replied.
Vega’s loaded questions and Homan’s unruffled replies reflect two divergent opinions on immigration enforcement in America. A great majority of those who elected Trump to a second term want all illegal aliens deported. Others do not support this position. But Vega is supposed to be a journalist above the fray, not a member of the opposition to an incoming presidential administration.
NAHJ does not see it that way. In fact, the group has even gone so far as to align itself with the urban Marxist radicals violently protesting ICE in the streets of America’s major cities.
NAHJ runs palabra, a news platform for freelance Hispanic journalists. Guadalupe serves as co-editor of the site. In June, palabra ran an article titled “‘Resilient Communities’: How People Are Stepping Up to Protect Immigrant Neighbors From ICE.”
The article favorably quoted Marxist activists fighting ICE. “‘We’re working to make sure that our community can adequately defend [its] rights against ethnic cleansing, kidnappings and human trafficking that ICE is doing and specifically targeting people in communities of color,’ said Angélica, an organizer with the Community Self-Defense Coalition, who asked not to share her last name,” the article reads.
It failed to mention the coalition’s overt Marxist ties.
The Community Self-Defense Coalition is “a front group for Union del Barrio,” the conservative Front Page magazine reports. “Union del Barrio is a Marxist group which draws inspiration from the Communist Cuban revolution and its stated mission is destroying the United States in the name of La Raza, meaning the Latino ‘race,’ to replace it with a ruthless leftist dictatorship.”
The woke institutional rot in America runs deep. Excising it from corporate America will take years. But removing it from the so-called mainstream media will prove impossible so long as today’s credentialed journalists believe their personal “social justice” agenda is in perfect keeping with the standards and ethics of a profession that has completely lost its way.
