CBS Evening News spotlights Postville with too narrow a beam

COMMENTARY: CBS News Correspondent Seth Doane came to Postville at the end of last week to highlight the growing economic crisis in the community.

The focus of this round of national attention is primarily on the town’s future, and not necessarily that of the residents or Agriprocessors, the kosher meatpacking plant that was the site of a massive immigration raid in May.

The video footage shows several scenes from the two-block downtown area, at one point zooming in on a “going out of business” sign that was hung in a store front several weeks ago. There is also brief footage from a recent City Council meeting when Mayor Bob Penrod requested the town be declared a disaster area so it could receive help from government entities up the bureaucratic food chain.

Iowa, however, a state that has been ravaged by flood and tornadoes and is now facing severe cuts in order to balance the budget, may not be much help. The federal government — either the villians or heroes of Postville, depending on your point of view — is also grappling with budget deficits and an economic crisis.

Bernard Feldman, the current chief executive at Agriprocessors, has written in an affidavit to the federal courts that the plant is actively pursuing buyers and that he anticipates a change of ownership in the near future. Rumors have floated in Postville for several weeks about potential buyers, discussions that has local residents hopeful, but leery of what may come. The buyers being pursued, at least prior to the latest round of federal indictments, were people that would be open to the possibility of allowing the Rubashkin family to maintain a certain level of management at the plant.

In the CBS report Doane does speak with an immigrant family that worked illegally at Agriprocessors. He also notes that the family remains in Postville, at least in part, because they will be government witnesses against plant management. But Doane fails to indicate that this particular family is one of many — all of which have been left in a rural community without means to care for themselves. The immigrant families — like so many others with proper paperwork brought into the community after the raid — now life hand-to-mouth, and only by charity.

Doane also speaks with a “legal” family to show the impact on traditional Postville residents, but he fails to mention how many people the plant employed. As the comments following the CBS report will attest, those who have not been following this story closely see Postville as either black or white. That is, the public doesn’t realize that roughly half the plant’s workers were taken in the massive May raid and that there are traditional town residents who have been impacted. Without that knowledge, the public is likely to turn its back on Postville — chalking it up to a community of lawbreakers that simply should have known better.

Perhaps there will come a time when the national media realizes that Postville cannot be adequately covered by journalists who parachute in for a day or two. Maybe there is hope that the situation in Postville with all its myraid of facets will launch a national conversation not only on illegal immigration, but of industry trends to locate meatpacking plants in the rural midwest. Viewers might one day tune in to discussions of why meatpacking plant workers, who averaged $15 to $20 per hour in the late 1970s, are now worth only $10 per hour.