Chicago Matters, but does journalism?

I'm watching Chicago Tonight this evening, which is the nightly news program on our PBS station (nightly, that is, when they don't show WNBA games [??]). They have been featuring a series on immigration policy as their Chicago Matters topic, and tonight they got around to dealing with, well, I'll recreate their blurb:

The Skills Gap and H1B Visas
Airs Tuesday, May 29, 2007

The United States may be the world's business leader but, increasingly, American companies have to turn to the rest of the world to find the talent that's in short supply at home. We'll take a look at which Chicago area companies are looking abroad to find the employees they want and need and how an immigrant community of highly skilled professionals fits into the fabric of American life.

Am I the only one who reads this and feels that the conclusion has already been written? What we saw was not a dispassionate, objective look at a very important topic, but a story spooled directly off the pro-business press release factory. I wrote to their forum to toss in my thoughts, and I'll recreate that here:

This evening's story (Tuesday) was quite disappointing in that it fell into the standard A-B (small) - A - B (tiny) format of so many news stories. A lengthy initial part, telling us that companies are having trouble finding qualified workers and we need to jump on the H1-B train, was followed, not by statistics or industry groups, but by one fellow who has had trouble finding work. Then came more discussion of why it is vital to get overseas workers, finishing with one more comment by the same unfortunate fellow.

What I did not hear in this story was any mention of salaries, an examination of how the H1-B visa recipients are undercutting the labor price in these areas. Far too often, reporters allow the pro-business contingent to say, whether we're talking about skilled or unskilled labor, "they do the jobs that Americans won't or can't do." What is almost always omitted is the phrase, "at the price business wants to pay."

Between offshoring and the importation of labor, we are lowering salaries and, perhaps more importantly, suggesting to young people that there is no future in studying certain areas. If the company featured in your report wants to attract CS-EE workers (and there are plenty out there), they can do what has traditionally been the way to attract talent: they can compete for it by offering higher wages, better benefits, a better environment, and so forth.

But they don't want to do that, not while they can work the system to hire people who will work for less in return for migrating to this country. Who benefits from this is clear - less clear is the price that is paid in lower opportunities for citizens who have paid the requisite dues, and the future costs of the brain and experience drain that will accrue to other countries.

I'll finish by elaborating on the first paragraph. So many "in-depth" stories on the news have that format, or more commonly, the A-B-A format. It's prevalent in any story of any complexity, most often a medical story.

Say we have a three-minute story on how, say, soy milk reduces the incidence of cataracts. (I'm not suggesting that's true, of course, but it does fit into the stock [product/drug/treatment] [reduces/improves/eliminates] [affliction/disease/crippling self-esteem] story line that these all go by.) About 2:10 or so is spent on following an average patient as he/she describes the fear of cataracts, then the hopeful tag line by the reporter ("but there may be hope"), the interview with the doctor who decided to give this a try, another interview with the patient as he/she talks about how easy it is to drink soy milk, an interview with the Soy Council representative, and maybe another quick couple of sentences by the doctor. Then there is, perhaps, 20 or 25 seconds with the stick in the mud doctor who points out that there is no causative reality here and that years of clinical trials will have to be conducted. However, we finish with 20 - 30 seconds of the patient playing with his or her grandchildren or dog or golf clubs.

What interpretation will the oft-distracted viewer take away from this story? Chances are, it won't be the warnings by stick in the mud, but SOY MILK = FEWER CATARACTS.

And that is precisely the impression that the viewer will take away from the WTTW piece, that American business is desperate for workers that America simply can't produce, and if we want to stay strong ("the world's business leader"), we better make sure that we hang on to the superior people from other lands who will do that work (or, better yet, move the work to where they already are and bypass the whole ugly visa issue altogether).