New York Times Shill - Part 2
New York Times Shill - Part 2
Date: Sunday, June 08, 2003 1:39 PM
JOB DESTRUCTION NEWSLETTER
www.ZaZona.com
Joe Guzzardi did further research on the Preysman article. He
discovered a few more things that further sully the reputation of the
NYT.
It's better to go to the webpage because there are a lot of links.
http://www.vdare.com/guzzardi/preysman.htm
June 03, 2003
We Reveal Another New York Times Scandal!
By Joe Guzzardi
The VDARE.COM policy regarding the New York Times is well defined: when
we get our shots, we take them.
The Times has been arrogant and unbending toward immigration reformers
for years. [Peter Brimelow says: ah, the Wall Street Journal is worse!]
So whenever we can humiliate the once great New York Times and that is
todays mission then let the fun begin.
Recently, the Gray Lady has reeled from one scandalous journalistic
failure to another.
To wit:
The Jayson Blair incident rolls on. In an interview with the New York
Observer, Blair revealed more ugly stuff about his character that makes
you wonder how the Times stood by him for so long.
Pulitzer Prize winner Rick Bragg quit following a heated dispute with
Executive Editor Howell Raines about his failure to attribute work done
by a stringer, J. Wes Yoder on a June 2002 story An Oyster and a Way of
Life, Both at Risk. [Pay archive free version]
Another Pulitzer Prize winner, Maureen Dowd, is under internal
investigation for possibly misrepresenting a portion of a George Bush
speech to suit her own purposes in her May 2003 column Osamas
Offspring.
In a flap unrelated to journalism but still delivering the Times a
black-eye, reporter Chris Hedges gave a rambling commencement speech at
Rockford College in Illinois that was vehemently anti-Bush, anti-Iraq
War. After the crowd booed and hissed Hedges with some of the irate
storming the stage, the mike was finally cut.
The latest New York Times disgrace, which VDARE.COM reveals today, is
how unethically it handled a sensitive reporting assignment about
impact of the H-1B/L-1 visas on American workers.
The story, titled Special Visas Use for Tech Workers is Challenged,
(May 30) was written by Katie Hafner and an intern from Dartmouth
College, Daniel Preysman.
But Preysman is not just any intern. His father, Vladimir Preysman, is
the C.E.O. of Datasweep, a San Jose-based company that employs,
according to the database Rob Sanchez maintains at www.zazona.com,
eight H-1B visa holders. Their salaries range from $55,000 to $100,000.
That is not all about Daniel Preysman. By plugging Preysman family
Daniel into Google, I learned that the aspiring journalist is the
beneficiary of a trust set up from an Oni Systems Corp stock sale.
Sources suggest that Oni Systems at one time employed Daniels
mother, Irene.
Oni Systems uses plenty of H-1Bs. The company applied for 135 Labor
Condition Applications (LCAs) for software engineers at $60,000 a
piece, a salary well below existing market levels.
If you guessed that there is little likelihood of fair reporting about
H-1B issues from an inexperienced intern whose family has a vested
interest keeping the visas rolling, then you are correct. The storys
thrust is clearly exculpatory.
When I called University of California at Davis Professor Norm Matloff
a leading critic of the H-1B visa program he said, One would think that
one does not assign a story about a controversial software industry
hiring practice to the son of one of the CEO of a software company,
especially in wake of the recent ethics scandals at the Times. Yet that
is exactly what the Times did.
Matloff found the story sadly misleading. For example, regarding the
legality of staffing American companies with H-1B visa holders, Hafner
and Preysman wrote:
The legal questions, however, remain murky. Steve Yale-Loehr, who
teaches immigration law at Cornell, said that strictly speaking, what
these companies are doing is legal, though perhaps not what Congress
intended. However, Mr. Yale-Loehr added, If Congress is upset about
this, then Congress will act on it.
But Yale-Loehr is only an Adjunct Professor at Cornell. His full-time
job is practicing immigration law at True, Walsh and Miller, LLP in
Ithaca, New York.
Yale-Loehr is also an active H-1B lobbyist who has presented testimony
to Congress on behalf of the American Immigration Lawyers
Association. He knows better than anyone that the AILA heavily
influences Congress to increase the number of visas issued annually.
Hafner and Preysman love to quote immigration lawyers. Thus Daryl
Buffenstein, [send him email] general counsel for the American
Immigration Lawyers Association is allowed to claim
Even if this brouhaha [American worker job loss] is about a real
problem, I think when you look at the number of workers involved, it is
a totally insignificant drop in a massive labor market.
This is an outrageous and unsupportable statement. Anyone who watches
CNN Moneyline with Lou Dobbs knows better:
I wanted ask the New York Times editors about the wisdom of assigning a
delicate story to an inexperienced reporter whose family has profited
by using H-1B visa holders.
But efforts to reach them failed as such efforts always do.
Although I wasnt able to reach the Times, the newspaper has left no
doubts about its enthusiasm for the H-1B visa with a June 1st Op-ed
(Why Ban Offshore Services? by Arjun Saxena and Douglas Lavin) and a
story (Fees from Visas Now Train Americans by Anthony De Palma).
Saxena and Lavin are consultants at Inductis , a multinational (offices
in New York, New Jersey, and New Delhi) company which specializes in
matching demand for labor with supply on a global scale. Moving
American jobs overseas, that is.
Matloff described the Op-ed as written by two industry people with a
blatant vested interest. And the story, according to Matloff,
represents industry lobbyists basically getting a free political
advertisement in the Times that masquerades as a news article.
The Times failure to report professionally is no surprise.
Officially, the Times has standards. See the New York Times: Code of
Conduct":
To avoid such conflicts, staff members may not write about, edit
material about or make news judgments about people to whom they are
related by blood or marriage or with whom they have close personal
relationships.
But unofficially, the Times does what it wants. And that includes
letting family shills co-author important news stories that affect the
lives of wage earning Americans.
The Preysman matter may represent a new low for the New York Times.
And that, given what has gone on lately, is quite a statement.
Joe Guzzardi [email him], an instructor in English at the Lodi Adult
School, has been writing a weekly newspaper column since 1988. This
column is exclusive to VDARE.COM.
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