The article below makes the point better than I have. It is from a series originally produced in the 1990s about the coverage of unions and labour issues in the mainstream US media. It was reproduced on the International Labor Communications Association website, and I am reproducing it again here subject to the ILCA's acceptable use rules, which allow full reproduction of all their articles as long as it is properly credited.
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"Workplace" Coverage no replacement for real labour reporting

As corporate concentration of media ownership has increased, the labor beat has all but disappeared in the U.S. press. Very few media outlets have a reporter dedicated to regularly covering workers' issues, unions and the labor movement.

When working people do find their way into mainstream news, it's often in the form of "workplace" coverage -- a brand of soft, nonpolitical reporting that describes the problems workers face as lifestyle issues, not as economic disputes.

Many people, grateful to see workers mentioned at all, think workplace stories are better than nothing. But this style of coverage has serious drawbacks.

Take, for example, a recent front-page New York Times story (8/16/94). Headlined "Moonlighting Plus: 3-Job Families on the Rise," the article by Louis Uchitelle profiles a number of families that have found that one job per wage-earner just isn't enough.

The portrayals are sympathetic; the Times presents the families as hardworking and ambitious, frustrated by the barriers they face in simply surviving economically, much less getting ahead. But the piece is strangely silent about the forces that consign families to such a struggle, beyond the reporter's offhand claim that U.S. wages haven't risen because "economic growth has been insufficient to make that happen."

That's exactly the trouble with workplace stories: Economic realities like stagnant wages and rising prices are presented as natural phenomena, almost like the weather -- instead of conscious choices made by business owners, bankers and politicians. The idea that owners and investors may benefit from keeping workers low-paid and job-hungry is utterly absent in these reports, which rarely question corporate motives. Individual workers may be heralded for "weathering the storm" (getting off welfare, putting kids through college), but the unequal balance of power between workers and those who create the economic "climate" is not discussed.

With its frequent focus on individuals, the workplace style of coverage implies that the solutions for general economic crises are the responsibility of the individual. Notions of social reform to address economic hardships are frowned upon as too costly or dismissed as outdated "social engineering."

This individual-responsibility angle shaped a September 13 segment on NBC's Today show, which focused on Working Mother magazine's annual survey of "the best companies for women." The survey grades companies on such things as child and elder care policy, schedule flexibility and family leave. Valuable information, certainly, but the framing of the segment was striking: The point evidently was not to criticize (or encourage) any particular policy, but simply to list which companies women should, as host Katie Couric put it, "steer away from." No one pointed out that few job-seekers have the luxury of picking and choosing among potential employers.

While workplace coverage generally lacks a critical perspective, some is hardly news at all, but soft-focused stories on trends or styles. The Wall Street Journal's misnamed "Labor Letter" is a model of fluff reporting: The weekly column (with the subheading "A Special News Report on People and their Jobs in Offices, Fields and Factories") has featured such hard-hitting "labor" items as "bathrooms make fertile job-hunting grounds" (9/13/94) and "temperature wars: employees grouse over where to set the thermostat" (8/16/94).

A notable feature of most workplace coverage is the lack of recognition of unions and their role in improving conditions for all workers. The New York Times piece on three-paycheck families, for example, notes that "no other industrial nation approaches the United States in multiple jobholders," and the "clear implication" that "in other countries, wages from one job are sufficient." No mention, however, of the strength of European unions, which assuredly accounts in good part for this difference.

In an essay in The New Labor Press (ILR Press, 1992), former New York Times labor reporter Bill Serrin warns that some papers use workplace coverage as an excuse not to cover organized labor. Serrin tells of a union representative whose story suggestion was rejected by a reporter for a major paper -- not because it wasn't newsworthy, but because the reporter in question "covered the workplace, not labor."

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Originally posted by robbie_dee:
...Serrin tells of a union representative whose story suggestion was rejected by a reporter for a major paper -- not because it wasn't newsworthy, but because the reporter in question "covered the workplace, not labor."

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Next time the media, any media other than independent or college media, has a report about class struggle...focus on the language used. Be Chomskian. Disputes between workers and bosses are called "labour" disputes. Even when the boss locks out the workers and prevents said workers from working...the dispute is a "labour" dispute. **It is an endless prejudice in the media. It doesn't suprise me in the least and the only remedy is to support working class institutions and media by putting our money where our mouth is...or working at nurturing such institutions.

But perhaps we should fight harder for public institutions to depict working people with the same kind of dignity that the combative side of the women's movement has demanded about the depiction of women. One movement can and should learn from another.

** Disputes have 2 sides. At least. So, presumably, media descriptions of such disputes should identify both sides...by calling such conflicts "labour-management" or "management-labour" disputes. Yet the "objective" media never does this. The selection of language frames the very thoughts that people have.

[ 25 August 2004: Message edited by: N.Beltov ]

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Originally posted by Oliver Cromwell:
I dunno. I keep wishing for economic reporting produced by people who actually know something about economics. I've long since stopped holding my breath.

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Two sides of the same coin, Mr. Cromwell. Non-caricature economics would be politically a problem for the very wealthy, so it doesn't get press.
Just the same as labour reporting with some digging into causes would be politically a problem to the very wealthy (such as those who own the newspapers/buy the ads in the newspapers), so it doesn't get press either.

And of course the more concentrated ownership becomes, and the less meaningful competition there is, the less counterpressures to put anything solid in the papers.

Face it, Mr. Cromwell--the reason your scholarly economics show no signs of reaching the mainstream or being taken into account in policy is that politics has its own independent dynamic. The upper crust don't *want* an optimum economy. They just want more. When they're in the driver's seat they'll rewrite the rules to give themselves more advantages whether that's good for stuff at large or not.

I'd go further--at the top levels, money becomes a positional good. The point is not how much in absolute terms, the point is having *more than* others. If the pie gets smaller but that means your slice is bigger, that not only isn't a problem--it's probably *good* from the hyperrich perspective. For non-hyperrich people this isn't the case--their use for money is spending it and using it to gain security (savings for retirement, insurance etc). But the hyperrich can't spend it all and they are secure. Everything left over is about status and power and the game of who's on top. It changes their behaviour and motivation, and changes the kind of good money is for them.

I'd agree with the first point. Newspapers want to sell advertising space, so they don't care if an analysis is correct or not. If it generates buzz, that's all they care about.

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Face it, Mr. Cromwell--the reason your scholarly economics show no signs of reaching the mainstream or being taken into account in policy is that politics has its own independent dynamic.

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I of course deplore the gap between economics and popular discourse. But I'm less worried about being taken into account in policy. In one of my early posts in this thread, I said

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When it comes to economics, I'm not sure just how important PR is. FTA/NAFTA and the GST were implemented with almost no effort to mobilise the public beforehand. And both initiatives have survived three (4?) elections. [ed: written in January. These policies have now survived 4 elections. Those of us younger than 30 probably have no memory of a time when these policies were not in place.]

My explanation for this is that these policy initatives originated in the world of extended academia (extended to include public sector economists who publish in academic journals and attend academic conferences). This community is very small in Canada. I'm not particularly well-connected, yet I know literally dozens of people who work at the Bank of Canada, Finance and various other ministries at both the provincial and federal levels. I'm not name-dropping; I don't know any deputy ministers, and you wouldn't recognise the names of the people I know (unless you were also an academic economist, in which case, you'd know them as well). But they're the ones who write up the executive summaries for the Powers That Be. And when policy makers look for new ideas, they look to them.

I don't have to mount a PR campaign to get access to these people. If I had something substantive to say about policy, I'm pretty sure that I could arrange a sympathetic hearing. They all have the same training as I do, so we all speak the same language.

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As it happens, I can actually point to a tax measure in the last federal budget that was a direct result of my work. Really.

I don't know what of make of the 'hyper-rich upper crust' argument. If they're so adept at manipulating public opinion, why are we having this discusssion? My experience with these sorts of arguments is that you invariably end up in tinfoil hat territory.

I'm not saying that there's nothing to these arguments. But any decent explanation of how these sorts of arguments can be used to explain what we observe has to involve falsifiable predictions for determining who will be in which group, as well as testable ways of predicting when the ruling group won't get its way.

You'd then have to go on to show that these predictions fit the data better than a model in which the hyper-rich are motivated by the same concerns as the rest of us. Is there any evidence that the hyper-rich accept reduced rates of return on their investments in exchange for a yet-to-be-precisely-defined notion of 'power'?

I've come to realise that I'm not particularly wedded to any particular sets of economic propositions. If a better idea presents itself, I'll adopt it. But I'm much more stubborn about methodology.

[ 26 August 2004: Message edited by: Oliver Cromwell ]