San Diego Union-Tribune ombudsman Gina Lubrano's column today addresses the paper's coverage of the immigration rallies that took place across the nation last week. Unfortunately, I have a couple of bones to pick with Lubrano's reporting.

First, there is this bit:

It was not quite as straightforward as that. To say that the march, which drew an unprecedented 50,000 to 100,000 people (depending on whose estimate you accept), was only about illegal immigration would be wrong. As the story said, many of the marchers were not undocumented immigrants. Aida Bustos, editor of Enlace, the Union-Tribune's bilingual Spanish weekly, said one of the four reporters who covered the march for the Union-Tribune interviewed about a dozen marchers and only one was undocumented.

I can almost guarantee that the reporter was not demanding that protesters turn over their papers. A more accurate statement would be that only one admitted that he or she was here illegally. That's what "undocumented" means, as much as it seems that people want to obfuscate the issue.

The other thing that really ticked me off was the classic straw man argument.

Bustos said that contrary to what some radio commentators would have you think, not all immigrants in this country are here illegally.

Bustos apparently doesn't acutally listen to any of those radio commentators, because I can't think of a single one who claims that "all immigrants ... are here illegally." In fact, the rhetoric used on the airwaves is usually decrying the fact that illegal immigrants are jumping to the head of the line and asking what sort of message "earned legalization" sends to all of those waiting to enter the country legally.

Bustos pointed to a national poll last month of legal immigrants by New American Media. Of those polled, “62 percent of Latin American immigrants said they were hurt by the tone of the immigration debate,” she said.

The reason they are "hurt" by the "tone" of the immigration debate is because people who look like them are the ones breaking the law en masse.

Bustos said the issues involving immigration present a “challenge to American journalism to present this story with all its nuances.” That calls for reporting the issues with clarity and with neutrality.

I'm all for clarity and neutrality, but the straw man that Bustos used earlier in the article shows that there's still a ways to go on that score.