Where the agenda gets set

This is a story about a leading employer in rural Arkansas and a leading cultural influence in rural Arkansas—different entities in this context.

The story does not occur in the state, but in Iowa and New York and conceivably beyond. The point transcends place.

That point has to do with the toxic intersection of media and politics in our troubled time. The toxicity produces purposely misleading information that agitates resentments and divisions and serves partisan political interest without full or fair context or legitimate or worthwhile public illumination.

The principal players are Tyson Foods of Springdale and Fox News of media-market dominance in Arkansas. As Sarah Sanders could tell you, Fox—certainly not this space— is where the Arkansas political agenda gets set.

Three things happened on March 11.

First, Tyson Foods announced it would close its 1,200-employee pork processing plant in Perry, Iowa, about 40 miles from Des Moines. It said it was doing so for efficiency. There was a bit of an oversupply in pork production and the company said it could produce the same amount of pork by closing this plant, which is old and not equipped for more than one shift. It offered jobs to all affected employees in other company plants, four in Iowa.

Second, The Wall Street Journal produced a report that Tyson was reaching out to asylum seekers—in New York mainly but not exclusively—who had work permits and Social Security numbers. It said Tyson had jobs available corporation-wide in all its many divisions.

Tyson has long relied on immigrants in its workforce. It has done job fairs and worked in partnership with charitable nonprofits seeking work opportunities for refugees— not undocumented immigrants, but refugees.

That same day, Bloomberg News reported that Tyson was trying to hire immigrants to fill 52,000 jobs that other people didn’t want, such as washing raw meat and checking it for bones. The number of jobs was greatly overstated, according to Tyson, and was more like 6,000 to 9,000.

So, in prime time on Fox on March 14, talking-head Jesse Watters extolled Perry, Iowa, as a paradise where good Americans were getting fired by Tyson so that Tyson could hire immigrants for $16.50 an hour plus benefits to replace them. Watters interviewed Ohio U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance, the “Hillbilly Elegy” author turned Trumpian demagogue, who vowed to get to the bottom of whether what Tyson was doing was legal, which he said it shouldn’t be.

It is not legal, which would be a problem for Tyson if it was doing what Fox said.

“This was the Democrat plan all along,” Watters declared, meaning, presumably, to find efficiencies in pork production in Iowa—heavily white and America-born—so that it could fire salt-of-the earth real Americans and hire immigrants in New York.

Fox did not mention that the employees in Perry were offered other jobs. It did not mention that Perry has had a population spike and demographic shift in recent years with new Hispanic residents. It did not mention that this was not remotely any kind of direct swap, or even a related matter.

But that’s for readers to decide, and, sadly, my experience is that many readers will engage in what will amount less to well-considered objective decisions than to reflections of pre-emptive biases and resentments.

For the record, the Fact Checker columnist in the Washington Post investigated this matter and declared the Fox report wholly misinformation.

To me, the best way to pose the question for a fair and meaningful answer would be as follows: Do you think a white able-bodied native-born American seeking work as a Tyson raw-meat washer and bone-checker, and willing to move, would get a job?

Please understand that I’m not asking for myself. I’m asking to stimulate objective consideration.

I’m fine here in the news media, which used to be about fair and full context and legitimate and worthwhile public illumination.

John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers’ Hall of Fame. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett feed on X, formerly Twitter.