In a piece headlined “Where Was ’60 Minutes’ When Rust Belt Jobs Were Cut?” TownHall.com writer Salena Zito decries the weekly CBS newsmagazine’s focus on the workers laid off by convicted felon President Trump and drug-addicted billionaire Elon Musk’s ongoing destruction of the federal government at the alleged expense of media attention that Zito asserts should instead be directed at the millions of Rust Belters who have suffered so terribly over the last half-century.
“Sept 19 marked 47 years since thousands of workers, who were mainly men, did what they did every Monday in the valley. They walked into the Campbell Works of Youngstown Sheet and Tube along the Mahoning River for the early shift. Within an hour of the workers’ shift, Youngstown Sheet and Tube abruptly furloughed 5,000 of them in a single day. Within months, 16 more plants owned by US Steel shut down, including Youngstown-based Ohio Works. The company cited foreign imports, lack of profitability, aging facilities and the cost of growing government regulations on the industry to explain the move,” and blah blah blah, Zito writes, taking a while to get to the point.
“On a recent ’60 Minutes,’ Scott Pelley interviewed a woman named Kristina Drye, who lost her job during the US Agency for International Development shutdown,” Zito continues, quoting Drye telling Pelley “Twelve days ago, people knew where their next paycheck was coming from. They knew how they were going to pay for their kids’ day care, their medical bills. And then, all gone overnight.”