Date: Tue, 21 Sep 2004 13:53:43 -0700 From: Norm Matloff To: Norm Matloff Subject: 60 Minutes scandal and H-1B To: H-1B/L-1/offshoring e-newsletter In the wake of the revelation that 60 Minutes broadcast a show critical of George Bush using fake documentation, there is speculation that Dan Rather may be forced to resign. Well, I'd like to say that if Rather is forced to resign, then so should 60 Minutes correspondent Leslie Stahl. As many of you will recall, earlier this year 60 Minutes, with Stahl as the correspondent, ran an extremely biased piece on the Indian Institutes of Technology, a chain of highly selective technical universities. The show was, to me, clearly part of the PR campaign underway at the time, called "Brand IIT," one of whose purposes was in my opinion to promote offshoring to India and raising of the H-1B visa cap. The show was filled with outrageously false claims, not least of which was that the IITs were the best in the world. As I wrote at the time, at http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/60Mins.txt http://heather.cs.ucdavis.edu/Archive/60Mins2.txt India should indeed be proud of what is has accomplished with the IITs, and it was perfectly reasonable to do a 60 Minutes segment on that topic. But it was NOT reasonable to run it as a PR puff piece. The week before, 60 Minutes had run a segment on Stephen Hawkings, the severely disabled physicist, and yet in spite of Hawkings' enormous courage etc., 60 Minutes still felt it necessary to add "balance" by quoting a rival physicist who said that Hawkings' research work wasn't that great. Yet 60 Minutes felt no need for balance in the IIT piece. Worse, in spite of viewer complaints, 60 Minutes never ran a single letter of dissent in its Letters segment of the show, even though they re-ran the show on several occasions. One angry viewer contacted the producer, and eventually I was brought into their e-mail conversation. The producer made no concession whatsoever that the show may have been biased. Being the naive, trusting type that I am, I believe that 60 Minutes was duped into running that IIT piece, just as they now claim to have been duped in the Bush National Guard story. Yet, even if they were duped, it certainly would show how badly CBS' standards have slipped. 60 Minutes certainly should have sensed that the person who approached them had a political agenda, especially since Stahl visited the IIT anniversary celebration, where there was clearly a political air. And even a high school sophomore writing a report for homework would know that claims made by IIT promoters that it is "the best engineering school in the world" ought to be checked out; even a cursory investigation would have shown that the IITs are NOT considered to be "the best engineering school in the world," or even the best in Asia. On the other hand, it could well be that 60 Minutes wasn't duped on the IIT issue at all. We are increasingly seeing the major media being manipulated by corporate and political interests. Reportedly Larry King has refused to have Kitty Kelley, author of the new salacious book on the Bush family, on his TV show, even though he's had her on the show for her previous books. I have no idea whether Kelley's claims about the Bushes are valid or not, but it certainly is sad to see respected journalists turned into political operatives/pawns. Norm