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Bill O'Reilly has been all worked up about that SPJ column by Leo Laurence advising journalists that they should stop using the phrase "illegal immigrant", first misreported by Megyn Kelly at Fox as an SPJ "campaign".

It's worth remembering, first, the core of Laurence's argument -- namely, that identifying undocumented immigrants as "illegal" prejudges them in a way that can only be determined by a court of law: Laurence calls it the "Constitutional Principle":

One of the most basic of our constitutional rights is that everyone (including non-citizens) is innocent of any crime until proven guilty in a court of law. That's guaranteed under the Fifth, Sixth and 14th Amendments of the Constitution, as I learned during four-year post-doctoral studies in appellate law at the California Court of Appeal in San Diego.

The presumption of innocence is an ancient tenet of criminal law. That legal doctrine is basic to our common-law system of jurisprudence. It has also been adapted by many countries following the Na-poleonic, civil-law legal system including Italy, Spain, Brasil, Poland, the Philippines, Russia and the United Nations. It's often expressed by the phrase “innocent until proven guilty,” credited to English lawyer Sir William Garrow (1760-1840).

Simply put, only a judge, not a journalist, can say that someone is an illegal.

So how does O'Reilly respond? With disinformation and disingenuousness:

LEO E. LAURENCE: This is not political correctness. It's a very conservative issue of constitutional law. It just says that in the law and Constitution, everyone is presumed to be innocent until proven guilty in the court of law.

O'REILLY: OK.

LAURENCE: So, it's not a journalist that can say someone is illegal. It's a judge.

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Megyn Kelly got all worked up yesterday over Leo Laurence's piece outlining an initiative by the Society of Professional Journalists' Diversity Committee to, as they put it, "engage in a yearlong educational campaign designed to inform and sensitize journalists as to the best language to use when writing and reporting on people of different cultures and backgrounds". (Notably, Kelly makes it sound as though this were some kind of active campaign, when in fact, as the SPJ notes, "The committee itself has taken no official initiative on the use of the phrase 'illegal immigrant.' ")

So she brought in GOP operative Brad Blakeman and Jehmu Green from the Women's Media Center to engage in a classic Fox 'fair and balanced' debate in which the host and the right-wing guest get to run roughshod on the token 'liberal'. You could pretty much figure where Kelly was coming from when she lobbed this softball to Blakeman:

Kelly: How far could you take this? You could say that a burglar is an unauthorized visitor. You know, you could say that a rapist is a non-consensual sex partner which, obviously, would be considered offensive to the victims of those crimes.

Hey, nothing like a classic "fair and balanced" analogy to make the segment complete, eh? Memo to Megyn Kelly: You're comparing violent criminal acts to a civil misdemeanor, which is what having undocumented status is. (More on that in a moment.)

Obviously Kelly was quite enamored with the analogy, because she returned to it with Green:

Kelly: What if there was a push by the criminal defense... bar to re-brand the use of the word rapist to nonconsensual sex partner?

Finally, she wrapped it all up in a bow with one of the dumbest comparisons of 2010:

Kelly: You know, we did a segment earlier in the year on how little people find the term midget offensive, and so you can't say that anymore. There's so many words that are suddenly becoming hurtful, and part of the group thinks it's hurtful, and the other group doesn't, and you're left as a journalist saying, I don't know what to do.

Sigh. Well, we've explained this before:

There's a reason the National Association of Hispanic Journalists urges their colleagues to avoid dehumanizing terms like "illegals":

The term criminalizes the person rather than the actual act of illegally entering or residing in the United States without federal documents. Terms such as illegal alien or illegal immigrant can often be used pejoratively in common parlance and can pack a powerful emotional wallop for those on the receiving end.

Moreover, as Eric Haas at the Rockridge Institute points out, it's a grossly misleading phrase -- and one that reveals a powerful xenophobia:

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