Labor Unions and Censorship

Definition: Workers’ organizations formed for purposes of collective bargaining and mutual aid and protection

Significance: News coverage of this mass constituency has tended to be minimal and slanted, resulting in censorship by omission.

Censorship and control of labor news, information, and imagery is subtle—through omissions and errors, generalizations and stereotypes, misrepresentation and prejudice, and a double standard on commercial access to media, according to media observers. Censorship of labor is real, several studies have confirmed.

Oddly, labor and the press may pursue different agendas but share a heritage, according to Albert Zack, former public relations director for the American Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL-CIO). Zack pointed out in 1977 that the free trade union movement and the free press in the United States have the First Amendment to the Constitution in common.

In the 1800’s and early 1900’s, newspapermen such as Benjamin Day, Horace Greeley, John Swinton, William Allen White, E. W. Scripps, and yellow journalists Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst all courted working people in their coverage and crusades. The labor movement benefited from exposés about bad working conditions, child labor, and robber barons, all written by muckrakers and mainstream journalists alike. In the later twentieth century, labor began to be overwhelmingly portrayed as powerful, greedy, corrupt, and unnecessary.

Reporting about working people and organized labor declined from the early 1960’s to the late 1980’s, according to reporter Jonathan Tasini, who authored “Lost in the Margins: Labor and the Media,” a 1990 study by the media watchdog group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR).

Left Out

News about labor is censored in several ways, not the least of which is the absence of such news. The near-invisibility of labor news may stem in part from instructions from supervisors. According to Chicago Tribune reporter James Warren, however, most journalists stopped doing labor stories because labor means unions and unions are seen in decline. Warren, who wrote many labor stories, has argued that fewer stories mean less interest, creating a steady decrease in coverage that major newspapers, themselves large businesses, have not sought to halt. For example, the Tribune, at his prodding, put in a one-paragraph news story in the Saturday business section about a major local labor story.

In 1989 nightly newscasts during an eight-day period devoted thirty-six minutes in stories about a miners’ strike in the Soviet Union, but stories on the United Mine Workers’ strike against Pittston Coal in the United States totaled half that amount for that whole year.

Television news segments and national newspapers rarely mention unions unless there is a story about wage demands, a possible strike, or internal corruption. Illegal employee dismissals for union organizing, when reported, are considered isolated events, according to labor scholar Joshua L. Carreiro. When a strike is covered, the emphasis tends to be on the fact that the workers want more money, for example, rather than on the fact that management refused to give the workers a raise. Texas AFL-CIO communications director Christopher Cook has also pointed out that instead of covering legitimate union concerns in a labor-management dispute, reporters almost always focus on the potential negative economic impact that the conflict may have. Environmental reporter Karl Grossman, who also teaches at the State University of New York, has summed up media coverage thusly: “Censorship in the United States really functions as a sin of omission.”

News media have covered such labor-related events as the 2007 Writers Guild of America strike, three professional sports league lockouts between 2011 and 2012, pro-labor rallies in Wisconsin when Govenor Scott Walker sought to end collective bargaining for public-sector unions in 2012, and the longshoremen's strike in Los Angeles in 2015. However, these reports continue to be limited. Even when journalists include various perspectives, reports tend to be shallow and leave underlying issues unaddressed, as when mainstream news outlets glossed over economic disparities in covering fast-food workers' living-wage campaignsr in the 2010s.

Labor’s view is even omitted from mediated discourse. The press fails to seek and use labor’s perspective on national questions, whether the story is on the stock market or a debate over the North American Free Trade Agreement, according to scholars such as authors Michael Parenti and William Puette.

Generalizations and Stereotypes

Several analysts have outlined patterns relevant to the censoring and shaping of news about labor. Author Robert Cirino has cataloged thirteen types of bias, from sourcing, selection, and interviewing to placement, images, and the hidden editorial. Parenti has made a list of seven generalizations: labor struggles as avoidable disputes arising from unreasonable unions; company offers as uniformly positive; no comparison of executive compensation or company wealth with the sought-for worker concessions; emphasis on impact of strikes (for example, whether the flow of goods will continue despite the strike), not their causes; failure to consider harm to workers if strikes fail; few stories of workers’ solidarity and support; portrayal of the government as a neutral arbiter instead of a business ally.

Puette has described eight “lenses,” or judgments, that color coverage: labor protects lazy, insubordinate workers; powerful unions inhibit U.S. competitiveness; unions fail to represent members’ interests; union leaders are likely to be corrupt; unions and their membership dues should be voluntary; enlightened employers and benevolent laws make unions obsolete; unions institutionalize conflict; and unions are all alike and therefore share in the guilt or shame of any other union or labor leader.

Parenti has cited typical terminology as an example. The label “special interests” is commonly applied to unions, while “national interest” is applied to military and economic forces.

A Los Angeles Times survey found 54 percent of newspaper editors favored business over labor, while 7 percent sided with labor, Parenti reports. In their book Unreliable Sources: A Guide to Detecting Bias in News Media (1990), Norman Solomon and Martin Lee write that “News coverage provides little affirmation for working people. It’s routine for employers to receive much more respectful treatment than employees do. Rather than focus on the well-being of workers, mass media are busy doting on the fortunes of corporations.”

Limited Access

Sometimes censorship occurs as a result of limiting access to media. Public broadcasting, for instance, is reluctant to accept underwriting grants from labor unions because they are considered advocacy groups, while corporations are regularly featured and even solicited for contributions. Unions even have trouble getting newspapers and broadcast stations to take advertising, according to Morton Bahr, president of the Communications Workers of America.

Labor has gained a negative image, which discourages workers from unionizing and leaves them suspicious of labor groups. Working-class culture has been pushed out of existence by the motion picture and television industries, according to Parenti, who also points out that labor history is seldom taught in the schools. Working people have no sense, for example, of the origins of the minimum wage or the eight-hour day.

No Conspiracy

People who believe labor is being censored or tainted by media treatment agree on some reasons: the notion that labor, with dwindling membership and power, no longer matters; that there is a class bias by corporate media owners and publishers; and that labor promotes itself poorly. It is also generally agreed that there is no conspiracy in the media not to cover organized labor. The media are not so well organized as to be able to conspire; on the other hand, the media are sensitive to such general and pervasive influences as advertising money, the money that pays reporters’ salaries, and the corporate environment of newspapers and broadcasters.

Janine Jackson, a FAIR staffer, has argued: “A CEO doesn’t walk into a newsroom and announce a decision to kill labor stories. It doesn’t have to be so direct.” Reporters know, or quickly learn, which stories to write and which not to write: Reporters answer to editors, who answer to corporate managers. Readers of newspapers should not expect, according to Jackson, corporate-owned media to develop concern for workers’ issues.

Despite a need for better media coverage, unions often fail to create the type of excitement that attracts the press. Some unions have admitted that at least part of their problem with the media has been their fault, according to Sam Pizzigati and Fred Solowey, who wrote The New Labor Press (1992).

Bibliography

Carreiro, Joshua L. "Newspaper Coverage of the U.S. Labor Movement: The Case of Anti-Union Firings." Labor Studies Journal 30.3 (2005): 1–20. Business Source Alumni Edition. Web. 23 Nov. 2015.

Lee, Martin A., and Norman Solomon. Unreliable Sources: A Guide to Detecting Bias in News Media. New York: Carol, 1990. Print.

Parenti, Michael. Make-Believe Media: The Politics of Entertainment. New York: St. Martin’s, 1992. Print.

Parenti, Michael. Inventing Reality: The Politics of News Media. 2nd ed. New York: St. Martin’s, 1993. Print.

Pizzigati, Sam, and Fred J. Solowey, eds. The New Labor Press: Journalism for a Changing Union Movement. Ithaca: ILR, 1992. Print.

Puette, William J. Through Jaundiced Eyes: How the Media View Organized Labor. Ithaca.: ILR, 1992. Print.

Wittke, Sharon. "Covering the Demands of Low-Wage Workers." Gateway Journalism Review 43.332 (2013): 26–28. Communication Source. Web. 23 Nov. 2015.