Collectively, the New York Times’ articles on the rallies in support of illegal immigrants would make for neat souvenir programs for marchers to take home. As examples of balanced journalism, however, they are feeble indeed.

Nina Bernstein covered Monday’s march in New York City by illegal immigrants and their supporters, and managed to avoid the term “illegal” until her 12th paragraph. “The hotel housekeeper from El Salvador had taken a precious day off from cleaning up after tourists. The Senegalese street vendor had sacrificed an afternoon's sales. And the man with the hand-lettered sign that asked, ‘Did Pilgrims Need Green Cards?’ was an American-born asbestos-removal worker who had come to show support for union colleagues from Poland and the Dominican Republic. Other immigrant rallies held across the country yesterday may have been larger, but none was more diverse than New York's, as thousands converged at City Hall Park in brilliant sunshine to demand a path to citizenship for all.”

Bernstein throws in lots of “diverse” details: “The crowd heard invocations by the leader of a Buddhist temple and a rabbi who waved a matzo. They danced to salsa and to a Korean drumbeat supplied by a troupe in traditional dress, as tourists gawked from double-decker buses. They heard not only from both of New York's United States senators, but also from a Broadway actress and a Harvard-educated union leader who had cajoled Chinese waiters and garment workers to join the march despite fears of deportation.

"‘Your faces are the faces of America,’ said Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, who is running for re-election this year and is seen as a possible Democratic presidential candidate in 2008.

“Mrs. Clinton was cheered early in the four-hour rally when she thanked the rallying immigrants for their everyday work. ‘Your faces are the faces of those who give us a fair day's work -- and often not for a fair day's pay,’ she said.”

What Bernstein doesn’t get into is Clinton’s utter flip-flop on illegal immigration. Back in 2004, after Bush’s reelection, she told Manhattan’s WABC radio: “I am, you know, adamantly against illegal immigrants. Clearly, we have to make some tough decisions as a country, and one of them ought to be coming up with a much better entry-and-exit system so that if we're going to let people in for the work that otherwise would not be done, let's have a system that keeps track of them….People have to stop employing illegal immigrants. I mean, come up to Westchester, go to Suffolk and Nassau counties, stand on the street corners in Brooklyn or the Bronx. You're going to see loads of people waiting to get picked up to go do yard work and construction work and domestic work.”

Bernstein hails one marcher for the courage of showing up to a rally where no citizenship enforcement agents were in attendance: “For some, just showing up took courage. One man who marched on the Brooklyn Bridge, Manuel Gomez, 32, a carpenter, acknowledged that as an illegal immigrant, he was nervous about showing his face. ‘But we have no choice,’ he said.”

Reporter Rachel Swarns’ lead story took a nationwide look at the marches in American cities. “Waving American flags and blue banners that read ‘We Are America,’ throngs of cheering, chanting immigrants and their supporters converged on the nation's capital and in scores of other cities on Monday calling on Congress to offer legal status and citizenship to millions of illegal immigrants….Over and over again, construction workers, cooks, gardeners, sales associates and students who said they had never demonstrated before said they were rallying to send a message to the nation's lawmakers.”

Swarns finally worked in the other side, briefly noting the opinions of “outraged” “conservatives.”

“The demonstrations, while cheered by advocates for immigrants, have meanwhile fueled a sharp response from critics who have expressed outrage at the images of immigrants, some of them illegal, demanding changes in American laws.

“Talk of the marches has been burning up the airwaves on talk radio and cable news networks and has appeared in Internet blogs and conservative publications. Rich Lowry, the editor of National Review, described the protests with marchers carrying foreign flags as ‘ominous’ in ‘their hint of a large, unassimilated population existing outside America's laws and exhibiting absolutely no sheepishness about it.’”

Then it was back to flattering scenes of the happy marchers and their unlabeled liberal supporters.

“In Washington, demonstrators carried children on their shoulders, ate popcorn and draped themselves in the banners of their homelands as they cheered Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, who told them that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. had spoken here in 1963, and a host of other speakers, including John J. Sweeney, president of the A.F.L.-C.I.O., and Cardinal Theodore E. McCarrick of Washington.

“Across the street from the rally, about half a dozen people held signs that read, ‘Illegals Go Home.’

“But the small counterprotest failed to douse the spirits of the demonstrators, many of whom seemed almost giddy with their newfound sense of political power.

"‘Today we march,’ they chanted. ‘Tomorrow we vote!’’