Several UK nationals have recently been appointed to high-level positions like CEO and editor-in-chief at CNN, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, The Daily Beast, and The Washington Post.
Critics argue this could undermine the needs of American democracy amid political turmoil.
Some compare the style of British journalists to Fox News or Rupert Murdoch’s publications.
“Right-wing Brits running the Washington Post? Stuff of nightmares,” Dan Froomkin of PressWatchers.org wrote online.
“It feels very much like a dive headlong into the abyss,” SFGate.com columnist Drew Magary said.
“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,” Guardian columnist Margaret Sullivan said. “Right now, they’re not. And that means a course correction [by Lewis] is in order.”
Meanwhile, U.S. journalists are accused of ignoring the large-scale displacement of American middle-class jobs by visa worker programs.
Legal experts note visa programs were intended to replace U.S. workers with cheaper foreign labor, yet the media declines to report on this impact.
“They’re reaping what they sowed,” lawyer John Miano said.
“We’ve had presidents importing workers [via the H-1B program], and we get silence from the media on that,” he added.
“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,” 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,” Miano said.
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. “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.”
“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.”
“These British editors are in for a giant shock,” said Miano. “The typical American newsroom these days is filled with babies.”
