After almost 18 years away, I recently returned to my small Alabama hometown.  Most things hadn’t changed. The high school has moved, but the football team was still one of the state’s best. The cost of living is still reasonable and people are as friendly as ever. At first glance it even appeared my local paper hadn’t changed much either, but it had.

Years ago my hometown paper centered on down-home stories important to the average person in our little town. Small town politics, farming, cultural events, human interest, local crime, and, of course, football dominated its thin pages. The opinion section was small, but clearly local and conservative in flavor. It took only cursory glances at world beyond the state capitol. If you wanted to understand this small southern town, you only had to read The Ledger.

Today, the paper is printed out of town and national and international AP stories dominate its pages. The editorial section is a conglomerate of national syndicated, mostly liberal, columnists. My hometown newspaper has become a clone of every city newspaper I’ve seen in my 20 years of traveling across America.  The local newscasts are glitzier than what I remembered from years ago, but they seem void of any real news and are equally generic.  After talking to my family and friends (one of which is a local policeman) and having a few weeks of reacquainting myself with the area I’ve come to this conclusion: there’s a lot of news not getting reported in my hometown newspaper these days. 

Missing are the stories about how entire local farming communities have been taken over by immigrants from Mexico and Central America, places where Spanish was never heard a decade ago. Nothing is printed about the fact most of the workforce in the chicken processing plants are illegals. There is no mention of the gangs of young Spanish speaking teens stealing purses in front of Wal-Mart. “Action News” seems to have missed the action about the steady infiltration of hardened Mexican gangs into the area and their connections to the methamphetamine plague killing our children. Local investigative journalist can’t seem to find their way to the local emergency rooms clogged with illegals having children funded by the local taxpayers.   No, none of this is covered between the pages of my local newspaper or on the 10 O’clock news.  Instead, I find stories of Angelina Jolie’s new baby or hear Al Gore’s latest proclamation on global warming.  

If you live in small town America, start reading the local paper. Can you find any mention of the hordes of illegals clogging your local Wal-Mart at 2 a.m.? Do you see one story about the strange “Little Mexico” growing at the edge of your town? Is your local paper silent like mine? I’ve come to believe one of our most cherished private institutions, small town newspapers and broadcast media, are failing to report the single most important event of our time: the invasion of our small rural America by illegal aliens.

How did it come to this?  The American citizen has been betrayed us not once, but thrice. The first betrayal came in the late 1980s and early 90s when transnational corporations lobbied our government to open our borders to free trade. Overnight our heavy industries fled to China and points beyond. The second betrayal quickly followed when the remaining industries, unable to compete with the new foreign competition, made a dark deal with government to survive. They would be allowed to ‘insource’ illegal foreign workers. I know why the national corporate media didn’t cover this, but what of our hometown papers? What excuse did they have?

The greatest mass migration in human history, happening right where I grew up, is being soundly ignored by the local print and broadcast media and no one thinks to ask why. Such grand omissions are never by accident, they are engineered in the proud tradition of Stalin, Castro and Chavez: fueled with fear, money, or both. This is the third betrayal.

Even while facing dwindling readership hometown media mysteriously ignores the issues most important to their immediate readership. Small town papers were once the conscious of this great nation. Now our country finds itself without its grassroots voice. The giant awakens, only to realize he is mute.