They did the right thing in withdrawing the joint report.
The work in question was an enterprising feature. NBC News homeland security correspondent Julia Ainsley profiled “Pedro,” a pseudonymous 16-year-old who works overnight shifts, from 11 p.m. to 6 a.m., cleaning a slaughterhouse in Dodge City, Kan., for Packers Sanitation Services Inc. (PSSI). Pedro immigrated to the United States from Guatemala with the help of a smuggler, Ainsley reported, and sends almost all of his salary to his parents back home. He used fake papers that inflated his age to qualify for his job.
At the end of the segment, Ainsley disclosed that PSSI had requested the worker’s real name so that it could fire him “immediately.” NBC News decided to protect his identity so he could “share his story without the fear of losing the job he says he needs.” What’s more, Ainsley revealed that the company pledged to “redouble” its efforts to identify the employee.
The company made good on that vow. After the story aired, PSSI said in a statement, the company was able to identify the employee — and determined that he wasn’t a minor. “When this individual applied to work at PSSI, he presented false identification that cleared the federal government’s own E-Verify system. However, our investigation found no evidence that he is a minor — contrary to NBC News’ report,” the PSSI statement notes.
The opening sentence of the retraction spells out the rest: “A Guatemalan migrant who claimed he worked as a minor cleaning a slaughterhouse in Kansas by night while attending high school during the day is actually 21, NBC News has learned.” PSSI sent the network video of an interview in which Pedro said he wasn’t a minor; NBC News and Noticias Telemundo traveled to Guatemala to secure documentation of his age — a step that, it turns out, would have been prudent before publication.
The retraction mars NBC News’s investigative coverage of migrant child labor. In January, for instance, it published an “exclusive” about a federal investigation into whether children ages 13 to 17 were trafficked into illegal jobs at Midwestern slaughterhouses. Federal labor law prohibits employment of minors in hazardous jobs.
PSSI, which employs more than 16,500 “skilled food sanitors, microbiologists, technical experts, engineers and safety specialists,” has made headlines for violations of child labor laws. The U.S. Labor Department announced in February that it had fined PSSI $1.5 million after finding that the company had employed at least 102 children in 13 slaughterhouses in eight states. PSSI also has a years-long timeline of workplace safety issues. For example: A 39-year-old PSSI employee working at an Alabama chicken-processing plant was decapitated on the job in 2020.
PSSI says it has a “long-standing zero-tolerance policy against employing anyone under the age of 18 and we don’t want a single minor working for our company — period.” New hires, it says, are checked against the government’s E-Verify system, and “the only way our procedures could be circumvented is through deliberate identity theft or fraud at the local level,” reads a statement.
U.S. media outlets too rarely follow their mistakes with retractions and corrections. The actions by NBC News in this instance deserve commendation: Its retraction acknowledges the falsehood in the original story and explains how the network went about correcting the facts. (The network will address the matter on air as well, a network source tells the Erik Wemple Blog.) The network, furthermore, acted ethically in refusing to identify the subject of its piece to PSSI. Although it was reporting on an allegedly illegal practice, the role of a news outlet is not to assist companies in identifying child workers.
So when PSSI says that it “repeatedly implored NBC News to identify the individual in question” to no avail, good on the network.
Which brings us to NBC’s efforts to protect the employee’s identity. PSSI says it was able “to narrow our search for the individual they interviewed based on a review of NBC News footage from the segment.” The company’s statement doesn’t specify what clues were useful, and the piece carefully blurs the worker’s face; uses partial body shots; and, according to an NBC News source, disguises his voice during the interview. Yet the footage does reveal some clothing worn by Pedro — including a white sweat jacket with dark stripes — depicts his stature and shows what appears to be a bright red cellphone case. Those details could have assisted in identifying him.
Pedro is no longer employed at PSSI, the company confirmed to the Erik Wemple Blog on Thursday.
PSSI says that NBC News “recklessly” broadcast a false story. That’s quite an exaggeration: To corroborate Pedro’s claim that he was a minor, NBC News relied on the man’s word; the fact that he presented as a minor at the border and received government documentation is consistent with that claim, according to the retraction; and NBC News confirmed that Pedro attended a local high school at the time of the story, according to a network source.
Those steps weren’t enough, as the retraction discloses. But the network’s efforts weren’t reckless. Journalism is hard work.
