The U.S. journalists who are ignoring the displacement and demotion of many U.S. professionals by millions of imported visa workers are suddenly complaining about the inflow of British journos into their top media jobs.
“UK media execs are being handed some of the biggest jobs in U.S. journalism,” said a critical article in the media-industry site, The Wrap.com. The article continued:
some question whether the [hiring] choices are what America’s democracy needs. “Everybody’s screaming about how we have a crisis in local news,” said Jeff Jarvis, a journalism professor at CUNY. “I say we have a crisis in national news too, at this time when fascism is at the door.”
“Right-wing Brits running the Washington Post? Stuff of nightmares,” said a tweet from Dan Froomkin, at PressWatchers.org.
The Brit arrivals include Will Lewis, the new CEO of Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post.
“It feels very much like a dive headlong into the abyss,” responded Drew Magary, a columnist for SFGate.com. “Lewis is British. NEVER trust a British media executive,” Magary wrote.
“If Lewis is going to be successful … he’ll need to have the journalists with him all the way,” wrote Guardian columnist Margaret Sullivan. “Right now, they’re not. And that means a course correction [by Lewis] is in order,” said Sullivan, who formerly worked at the Washington Post and the New York Times as a media critic.
“They’re reaping what they sowed,” responded John Miano, a lawyer who has defended American professionals as their jobs have been transferred to imported contract workers.
“We’ve had presidents importing workers [via the H-1B program], and we get silence from the media on that,” he told Breitbart News, adding:
The H-1B, any way you look at it, this is a program that’s designed to replace Americans with cheap foreign workers. You look at the [legal] code — that’s this program’s entire purpose … [but] you won’t find any description like that in the American media. No [establishment journalist] would dare say that this program is designed to replace American support workers.
The economic impact of migration is huge, especially on white-collar Americans, but it gets little media coverage, Miano said:
If you look at the numbers, there’s a direct correlation between wages in the U.S. and immigration. Immigration used to be about 250,000 a year and at that level, wages grew with productivity. Starting about 1970, we had this huge increase from the Immigration Act of 1965 … and ever since then, U.S. workers have barely seen a raise. Immigration is one of the causes — there are a lot of other causes to blame it all on immigration! — but immigration levels should be a fraction of what they are.
Breitbart News has covered the visa-worker programs, including their direct impact on media jobs.
The government visa programs for mid-skill foreign graduates include the H-1B, L-1, J-1, OPT, H4EAD, CPT, TN, O-1, and E-2 programs. The government-delivered foreign managers and their ethnic-networked workers take a huge share of starter jobs and middle-management jobs in science, academia, computers, software, accounting, healthcare, fashion, architecture, engineering, marketing, recruitment, media, and much else.
The nation’s biggest tech conglomerates continued hiring foreign workers through the H-1B visa program, even as they carried out mass layoffs of American employees. https://t.co/Ebb3JhElhA
— Breitbart News (@BreitbartNews) May 31, 2023
The federal programs damage the workplace status of U.S. professionals, reduce salaries and career opportunities for U.S. graduates, and shrink the national innovation that would allow rising salaries.
“All the way up through to 2000 to 2003, we were expected to roll out every [software project] perfect, no defects,” veteran software designed Rex from Dallas told Breitbart News. “But after they started with the H-1Bs, now they expect large amounts of defects, and they’re okay with it,” he said.
The visa workers know they will lose their visas and be sent home if they disagree with their managers, he said,
They will do whatever they’re told to do, being over a visa barrel. You know Americans are going to say, like at Boeing for instance, “Hey, you can’t have one sensor that you’re betting all these people’s lives on, and you can’t write code to make it nosedive if the sensor quits.” These [visa worker] guys are going to just put their head down and say, “Okay, whatever you said.” I’ve seen that over and over.
In some cases, “once they get for citizenship and they’ve got their full-time [IU.S.] job, they will say what they think,” he said, adding:
But I’ve never seen it anywhere with anyone that was an Indian contractor, H-1B, or you know, whatever kind of visa they’re on … Usually, when they have Indian managers they stay like that, and, you know, they’re not likely to raise their voice. Some of them are actually pretty doggone good, and they’ve got good ideas, and they’re afraid to say them.
This replacement policy by investors and their C-suite executives has spiked stock values at enormous economic and generational costs to the American middle class and their children.
“Forced early retirement in Tech is extremely common – the norm, in fact,” said a Twitter account named Aethelleas on June 8. He continued:
My whole network was once Tech folks, and only the sides of my head are whitening, but most of them – highly skilled – were pushed out by Indian H1B networks years ago. And this year, the older [American] ones had their grad children laid off or turned away straight out of school.
“All these things are the issues that affect the labor markets that our media will not cover … [so] they’re becoming increasingly irrelevant,” said Miano. “I used to read the New York Times every single day, and now it’s not worth reading every day.”
In contrast, the media’s griping is prompted by a mere handful of new arrivals from Britain.
The Wrap wrote:
Most recently with the appointment of Will Lewis as the publisher and CEO of the Washington Post — and his latest restructuring plan, featuring the appointment of Fleet Street-bred editor Robert Winnett as executive editor after the election — British players are gaining a significant foothold in the U.S. media industry.These latest U.K. natives arrive just months after a growing list of others — CNN’s CEO Mark Thompson, The Wall Street Journal Editor-in-Chief Emma Tucker, Bloomberg News Editor-in-Chief John Micklethwait, The Daily Beast’s content chief Joanna Coles and the outlet’s new executive editor Hugh Dougherty.
“British men turning up to run everything is – and I cannot state this too strongly – a bad idea,” tweeted Emily Bell, a former British journalist at the left-wing Guardian newspaper who now works at Columbia University’s journalism school.
Each of our three newsrooms will be led by an outstanding white male, which we feel is especially appropriate in Washington DC. If these three newsrooms are successful, we will consider a fourth and fifth
— Margaret Sullivan (@Sulliview) June 3, 2024
“Many Americans hear “British journalism” and think ‘Oh, like the BBC,’” said a tweet from author James Fallows. “More useful to think ‘oh, like Fox News with a different accent.’ Murdoch has brought waves of right-wing Brits to [the] helm of WSJ. Now Bezos with WaPo.”
“These British editors are in for a giant shock,” said Miano. “The typical American newsroom these days is filled with babies.”
