Alas, Our Lousy Reporting

Yesterday I was doing a little research into the detention of 475 South Korean nationals working at a Hyundai battery plant being built in Georgia a couple of weeks ago. I was a bit shocked to learn that even two weeks later it’s basically a “he said, she said”. Hyundai says the workers were specialized workers it needed to build the plant; the federal government (and union leaders) say the workers included bricklayers, plumbers, electricians, and pipefitters. I wasn’t able to find a breakdown of how many of the detained workers were doing what. The best I could find was that “a majority” of the workers were engineers and specialized workers with skills unavailable in the United States. That could mean anything from 238 of them to 474 of them. It could also mean that the reporters didn’t know but that’s what Hyundai spokespeople told them.

Just for context foreign companies have been abusing the U. S. visa system for 50 years (at least). I know this first hand. Fifty years ago I worked for a German company which routinely sent Germans here to work on L-1 visas who did things that people on L-1 visas shouldn’t be doing. I doubt that’s changed since then. Just a few years ago I worked for a (basically) South Asian outsourcing company that routinely used people on student, tourist, etc. visas in addition to people on H-1B visas that should never have been on H-1B visas. I worked for them for seven years. That company never gave a single individual a raise during that entire period.

My basic question is what has happened to reporting? There doesn’t appear to be much. Mostly rewriting of press releases.

Just today in the daily briefing I get from Time there was a headline “Colombia-U.S. Relations Fray Over Drug War” with the following lede:

Relations between the U.S. and Colombia—longtime security allies—have frayed after Trump said the Latin American country has failed to crack down on cocaine production.

Now I’m not a Trump fan; I think he’s a clumsy international negotiator at best. But there is more than one way to report a story. One way is the way above, that Trump is complaining that Colombia has not “cracked down” on cocaine production. Here’s another way. Based on UNODC data Colombia’s cocaine production has been growing rapidly over the last ten years:

If the U. S. is the primary customer for that coke, it looks like something worth complaining about to me.

Again, I don’t know what the truth of the matter is. I just recognize that the reporting is lacking.