2007 News: Labor reporting struggles to find traction

By Torrye Jones

“UM janitors end 2-month strike.”

“Seattle-Area Garbage Haulers May Strike.”

Critics of today’s labor coverage have used headlines such as these found in media outlets across the country to question whether today’s coverage of labor is fair and balanced.

“The media is failing in their coverage of labor because there is very little reporting on labor issues and when there is reporting, it’s in negative light,” said UNC-Chapel Hill journalism professor Lucila Vargas, whose main academic interest is the role of media and communication in the reproduction of social distinctions such as class and race.

Vargas shares this common critique of the mainstream coverage of labor with many others, that is, the media are often not covering labor at all.

Labor coverage -- of the lack thereof -- in the media was criticized this past fall after BusinessWeek laid off longtime labor reporter Aaron Bernstein. John Judis, writing in The New Republic, stated, "If you had wanted to follow the growing conflict between afl-cio President John Sweeney and his former protégé, Andy Stern (of the Service Employees International Union), you had to read Bernstein. In September 2004, well before the conflict burst into the open, Bernstein wrote a cover story on Stern for BusinessWeek.

“But Bernstein didn’t just cover the labor movement. He covered the ferment over trade, outsourcing, immigration, inequality and the minimum wage."

The lack of media coverage of labor issues has been criticized by others. The Toronto Star's Antonia Zerbisias wondered last year in a column about the lack of labor coverage. And William Serrin, the former New York Times labor reporter, argued that the stories about the Sago mine disaster in 2006 would have been better if more media outlets had labor reporters.

People didn’t always view labor coverage in the media this way, though.

In the early 19th century, the media was a critical part of labor movements in the United States. In fact, there were hundreds of publications promoting rights of workers across the country. Those who were denied access to established papers, formed newspapers to provide a forum for the working man’s voice. These newspapers used the power of the pen for all it was worth.

Fast forward to 2007. Many say coverage of labor is almost nonexistent. There are not many labor media outlets. Issues such as contract negotiations, the declining union membership or safety hazards on the job faced by many workers and the poor enforcement of the laws designed to protect them are rarely touched by journalists.

About 12.9 percent of all working people in the United States belong to a union, according to statistics from the U.S. Department of Labor. Critics say this is a population that should not be ignored by the media. That number is down from the 1950s, when approximately one-third of all workers belonged to some union.

The decline in overall union membership has led to the closure of hundreds of labor publications, including the 2002 demise of the Racine Labor, a newspaper in Wisconsin that existed for 60 years and provided an alternative to the local newspaper, the blog states.

 

Biased Coverage?

Christopher Martin, who wrote a book titled “Framed!: Labor and the Corporate Media,” points out these main conclusions about today’s labor coverage:

1. The consumer is king.
2. The process of production is none of the public’s business.
3. The economy is driven by great business leaders and entrepreneurs.
4. The workplace is a meritocracy.
5. Collective economic action is bad.

Martin, an English professor at Miami University, said “(Labor reporting is) not done very often in terms of quantity of reporting — we don’t see coverage of labor unions or working people and what they do,” he said. “Secondly, when we do have coverage it’s not very good. By that I mean, the frames tend to be limited to issues that are beneficial to capital or corporations versus letting us see the laborer’s point of view.”

The dominant frame of labor news is from the consumer view, he said.

“News about labor tends to be framed around the interest of the consumer rather than the citizen,” Martin said. “Instead of explaining the issues, most stories will talk about how it affects the consumer.”

Take for example, the 1993 strike by American Airlines flight attendants, he said. The media framed the strike as a story of consumer inconvenience and expenses, not focusing much about the debate of class and compensation issues in the airline industry. “Most stories talked about the people who couldn’t fly or lost baggage, not the airport strike,” he said.

Vargas agrees about the consumer-oriented angles of labor reporting. “Many issues that have a great impact with the working class don’t get reported from their point of view, but from the investors’ and consumers’,” she said.

A 10-year study of labor coverage entitled: “Evidence of ‘Class Anxiety’ in the Chicago Tribune Coverage of Organized Labor” by Robert Bruno, a professor at the University of Illinois, showed labor was almost invisible in the newspaper, with only 386 stories in that decade (between 1991 and 2001) directly related to labor.

Bruno examined adjectives and concluded that 77 percent of stories were negative toward labor. By examining content, Bruno found that 32 percent of stories were about labor disputes, lock-outs or strikes. In these dispute articles, 95.3 percent of descriptive language was negative.

Only 11.4 percent of stories were about positive, productive labor management relations. Of these positive stories, 31.1 percent were about successful collective bargaining. Most of these stories were much shorter in word length than labor dispute stories, Bruno wrote.

In the 10-year period, there were only 17 positive stories on union political involvement and 16 on organizing. Less than one story annually centered on unions improving working conditions.

In its final conclusion, saying that workers were negatively characterized, the study said: “The Tribune’s reporting suggests that worker-based resistance emerges out of greed and laziness; that democratic dissent within the ranks indicates disorder and division; and that organizations run by leaders with working class characteristics are ineffective at best, and criminal at worst.”

However, reporter Steve Franklin has been covering labor issues for the Tribune for more than a year, and he has won a Studs Terkel Award for his stories. In the past year, he has written a number of labor stories, including a series about throwaway workers.

Franklin's coverage is the exception, not the norm, however. Strikes are just about the only union activities covered at any length by most media outlets, Vargas said, and this often portrays a negative attitude toward unions.

Another problem, she said, is: “The commercial media is a for-profit industry, and they don’t see the working class as desirable.”

Vargas said since the media is so dependent on profit, there are business sections that cover primarily the corporate world, who will advertise in the paper moreso than labor unions.

Martin agrees. “That is where the money is,” he said. “So if you think about the mainstream media and television networks — they make money off of business reporting because they have a lot of ads.

“Labor unions don’t have the money to buy ads, and have even been asked to not advertise because they seem partisan,” he said.

Media outlets, which have profit goals like any other large publicly traded company, have little reason to provided regular and fair coverage of labor unions, Martin said.

Martin pointed out a study by the Pew Research Center and the Columbia Journalism Review in 200 that conclude reportorial self-censorship, with 35 percent of journalists surveyed agreeing that “news that would hurt the financial interests of a news organization often or sometimes goes unreported.”

In addition, about 20 percent of reporters surveyed said they “faced criticism or pressure from their bosses after producing or writing a piece that was seen as damaging to their company’s financial interests.”

There is no good reason why there aren’t more labor sections or a business and labor sections in most major newspapers today, Martin said.

“Everyone is concerned about wages and health care. Everyone is concerned about the wealth gap — and a lot of these issues don’t get addressed,” he said.

Reporters try to be objective by not covering too much of both sides — the union and the company — and instead focus on consumer, Martin said.

Janine Jackson, FAIR.org’s program director, wrote in 1994: “When working people do find their way into mainstream news, it’s often in the form of ‘workplace coverage’ — what many call a brand of soft, nonpolitical reporting that describes the problems workers face as lifestyle issues, not as economic disputes.”

The same still rings true today. Stories such as Forbes’ “Bipolar Disorder in the Workplace” and the Green Bay Press-Gazette’s “Wired in the Workplace,” a story on iPods on the job, show up in newspapers across the country.

 

Case Study: The Tennessean

The media’s intention is just to get labor coverage in the paper because it’s relevant to people’s lives, said Deborah Fisher, assistant managing editor/business editor at the Tennessean.

“Covering organized labor is important because it represents a voice for a particular group of employees that often negotiate change in the workplace,” she said. “Also, as a business section, it’s important for us to continue to cover changes and trends in the workplaces of our community, as these changes and trends affect people's livelihoods and life, and the economic vitality of our city.”

However, the Tennessean changed the labor beat in 2006 with a new reporter, renaming the beat “workplace issues and small business.” This reporter will continue to cover organized labor issues outside of manufacturing, but including service industries which have gotten less attention, Fisher said.

But the beat no longer will be only about organized labor, she emphasized.

“It will be broadened to include other labor/workplace issues, such as the growing immigrant labor force and the coming retirement, the retirement of baby boomers, and workforce development and diversity,” she said.

“We want to broaden our approach to labor reporting to cover more workplace issues that affect people outside unions as well,” she added.

Tennessean reporter Bush Bernard said he thinks the new position will not suffice to having a labor reporter.

Whenever Bernard writes labor stories, he said they usually deal with dropping union membership, disputes with management, contract negotiations, strikes or lockouts.

With the new beat reporter having to focus on the workplace issues, there will be no time for covering more union issues, he said.

Bernard, who used to work in manufacturing, said when he talks to union members about his coverage, their responses are “usually positive.”

But, he said, it’s the “non-union members who send notes about labor crybabies getting what they deserve. There seems to be a lot of hostility against unions these days. The labor movement is shrinking each day and there’s not a lot of support out there for it.”

When asked how the working class feels about the Tennessean’s coverage of labor, Fisher said: “We haven’t asked lately, and perhaps we should. Tennessee is not a state with a lot of organized labor, but we do have a growing immigrant labor workforce.”

 

What’s the Solution?

Martin said that very few media outlets have a reporter dedicated to regularly covering workers’ issues, unions and the labor movement.

“The most recent study I did was look at the top 25 newspaper in terms of circulation,” he said. “Only 10 of those papers have a single beat labor reporter.”

In fact, some labor reporters feel like they’re not wanted in their newsrooms, he said.

“We could do a better job at the university level,” he said. “If you look at most journalism textbooks, they rarely even talk about labor. Some of them hardly talk about it at all, either one or two paragraphs in the business chapter. There are fewer people in labor unions, but still most people work and most people are concerned with these issues.”

 

Torrye Jones is a business journalism student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

 

Posted March 29, 2007