See Roberta Fresca, “Union Charges Media Biased,” Daily World, May 29, 1981.
While downplaying the Pittston strike, the networks and newspapers lavished sympathetic coverage to striking coal miners in the erstwhile USSR. During a nine-day period, the Soviet miners received over thirty-seven minutes of prime-time network news. Contrasts were made between the living standards of Soviet bosses and coal miners— something media never thought of doing in regard to the Pittston owners and miners. The Soviet strikers also were portrayed glowingly as fighters for self-betterment and social justice—a kind of representation never accorded US workers.18
In July 1989, CBS’s weekly television news show “48 Hours” did devote an entire hour to the Pittston strike. Reporters interviewed company executives who said they wanted production to resume but they couldn’t get the union to cooperate. Scabs said they wanted to work and didn’t need a union to tell them what to do; they spoke at length of threats and mistreatment from strikers. State troopers were portrayed as neutral peacekeepers who were just doing their job, clearing the roads as they arrested strikers who tried to keep scabs from entering the mines.
In what seemed like a show of balanced reportage, CBS also interviewed strikers who said they were struggling for a contract and had to stick together until victory was theirs. Strikers were shown at home, at rallies, and on the picket lines. But never were they shown telling the viewers what the strike was about, what actually was at stake. Missing from the entire hour-long presentation was any reference to the substance of the issues, the content of the conflict. Why were the miners striking? Not once did CBS mention that Pittston wanted to cut their wages and benefits by substantial amounts. Nor did CBS mention that Pittston was facing serious charges of unfair labor practices. A few such pertinent facts would have put the whole conflict in a different light. As presented by the network, the strike seemed to be a mindless contest of wills, pitting the stubborn, shrill, and rather foolish strikers against patient, soft-spoken managers who only wanted to resume production, “neutral” police who only wanted to keep the peace, and scabs who only wanted the freedom to work without union interference.
Likewise, national coverage of the 1990 Greyhound Bus strike offered little opportunity for the public to ascertain what was on the minds of striking workers. Company officials were afforded ample opportunity to comment, but union leaders and rank-and-file drivers received almost no exposure. With the aid of selective arithmetic, the real wage cuts that management sought to impose were represented as generous offers. A presentation of the union’s proposals was not to be found. Management was depicted as using “replacement workers” (scabs and strikebreakers) to “rebuild its fleet” and maintain services for the public (not to break the strike and destroy the union). Throughout the strike, the images were of a besieged, responsible management versus violent, irrational strikers, the latter showing a selfish indifference to the disruptive effects their strike was having on the economy.19
The media’s anti-labor biases should come as no surprise. Media owners themselves are among the most exploitative, anti-union employers and strikebreakers. At various times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, the New York Daily News, CBS, and numerous other news organizations have been locked in bitter strikes that sometimes have ended with unions being crushed. As Washington Post owner Katharine Graham is reportedly fond of saying: “Unions interfere with freedom of the press.”20
SAME STORY NORTH OF THE BORDER
The overall effect of the coverage of labour relations in the Canadian media is to present an image of an institution that has no moral or legal right to exist, and which has no positive contribution to make to our economy. Unions and their leaders are treated by newspapers, TV and radio stations as greedy, irresponsible, anti-social and disruptive. It is not surprising that ... given this persistent media distortion of labour’s image, governments’ anti-union legislation should be so widely endorsed. The standard of labour reporting in Canada—with only a few notable exceptions—is atrocious.
A recent survey of newspaper stories about unions ... disclosed that the same unfavourable words keep recurring. High on the list are strike, picket, demands, helpless public, breakdown, inflationary, labour unrest, held to ransom, inconvenience, labour bosses, callous, irresponsible, violence, contempt, lawless agitators, greedy, blackmail, and abuse of power. ...
The language used in describing the activities of business organizations is the exact opposite. Words such as growth, income, investment, capital gain, entrepreneurship, employment, and so on, are used to portray a generally favorable image of companies and their executives.
Ed Finn, “Labour Reporting in Canada,” The Facts, June 1983, p. 20; (publication of the Canadian Union of Public Employees).
THE INVISIBLE WORKER
A major study of how the three network evening news programs covered labor found that “the lives of 100 million working people— those who make the U.S. economy and society run—are being routinely ignored, marginalized or inaccurately portrayed in the media.”21 Less than 1 percent of the total available telecast news time dealt with US labor unions—and the bulk of that coverage was devoted to the Eastern Airlines strike. On the rare occasions workers were interviewed, they almost never were treated as experts regarding issues that directly affected them. When not on strike, unions and workers practically vanish from the national media. The issues that concern them such as work place safety and health, declining real-wage levels, seniority, job security, underemployment, work place racism and sexism, affordable housing, and child care are routinely ignored or given paltry treatment.
In sum, labor news is sparse, superficial, and framed in a way that regularly favors management. The media treat labor-management disputes as isolated incidents having no linkage to larger economic forces. Strikes are treated as aberrant disruptions of normal life not as systemic conflicts endemic to industrial capitalism.
The press regularly presents labor as unwilling to negotiate in good faith when in fact management—in pursuit of high-profit policies—is usually the side that refuses all compromises and forces a strike. By repeatedly ignoring the substantive issues that precipitate labor struggles, the press makes workers appear as irrational and greedy to the point of being self-destructive.
The press says little about the enormous wealth accumulated by owners. The billions paid out in stock dividends and interest on bonds (not to mention the millions paid to management in the form of fat salaries, stock options, bonuses, and other perks) represent an enormously inequitable upward distribution of the productive earnings of labor, a transfer of wealth from those who work to those who live mainly off those who work.
While having little of substance to say about the causes of strikes, the press greatly emphasizes the damage they do to the economy and the inconveniences inflicted upon the public. Little is said about the conditions of working people and their struggles in the face of the increasingly difficult economic conditions imposed on them by corporate power and government policies.
The mutual support that strikers provide for each other and the aid that unions sometimes extend to other unions are seldom noticed by the news media. During the coal strike of 1978 there was almost nothing on how farmers were bringing food to the miners. By ignoring the instances of worker solidarity and mutual assistance within and between occupations, the press denies the class dimension of the strike and underplays the support strikers have among other sectors of the public. The news media unfailingly portray the government as a neutral arbiter in the struggle between capital and labor, acting on behalf of the “national interest”—which itself is assumed to be best served by getting the workers back into production as soon as possible, regardless of the terms of settlement. The police—along with the courts, the president, and the rest of the government—are presented as neutral guardians of the peace and defenders of the public interest rather than as protectors of corporate property and bodyguards for strikebre
akers.
No wonder the American public, including many progressive people, has such a negative image of organized labor. No wonder that persons who are critical of racist, sexist, and antigay attitudes still harbor anti—working-class and antiunion sentiments of the kind propagated by the media and other institutions of the business dominated culture.
A negative image of unions discourages workers from unionizing and leaves them suspicious of labor organizations. With its monopoly over mass communication, business has been able to present a largely unchallenged picture of “Big Labor” as an avaricious, narrowly self-interested, and often irrational force that does itself, the economy, and the public no good, driving up prices with its incessant demands, making gains only for itself while creating costs that must be passed on to the rest of the public. Labor has no direct means of countering this negative image among the general public. If there exists for labor a free market of ideas, it is not to be found in the mass media.
“Liberal” Media, Conservative Bias
There exists not only public opinion but media opinions about public opinion. What the people think is one thing; what is publicized about what they think can be something else. The media cannot mold every political feeling we have, but they can fill the air with pronouncements about what our feelings allegedly are. The press may not be able to create a conservative mood within us but it can repeatedly announce that a conservative mood exists, thereby doing much to create the impression of such a mood and encouraging conservative forces to come to the fore. The press cannot stop protests, but it can discredit and ignore them, thereby discouraging popular political actions. In short, even more than manipulating actual opinions, the media have a great deal of power in controlling opinion visibility. They create a media image of public opinion that often plays a more crucial role in setting the issue agenda than does actual public opinion and which has a feedback effect on actual opinion.
The institutions of this society whose job, among other things, is to socialize people into patterns of conventional belief and acceptable behavior do not operate with perfect effect. Some people will still become disaffected. Longstanding grievances can erupt at unexpected moments. Sometimes extraordinary events play on the public’s discontents, galvanizing a kind of protest that not even the most skillful media propagandist, the smoothest educator, or the slickest political leader can mollify.
The Vietnam War was just such an extraordinary event. While the news media are often credited with, or damned for, making the war unpopular by providing daily accounts of its carnage, in actuality, during the early years of the conflict the press reported the war largely the way the US government wanted it reported, raising no serious objections about US intervention. Despite this, by 1967 or so, the antiwar movement had become a political force to be reckoned with.
After initially downplaying the war and the protests, the media began giving attention to both. Unable either to prevent or to ignore mass protests, the opinion manufacturers set about to misrepresent, discredit, and contain them. The story of how that was done is told elsewhere and will not be repeated here. 1 Suffice it to say that during the 1960s the media commentators spent more time attacking those who protested the enormities of this world than those who perpetrated such enormities. While there were a few exceptional moments of coverage in which protestors were treated with fairness, the cumulative impact of press coverage was to create the impression that these “kids” were violent, extremist, and dangerous to society. Thus the protestors were made the issue rather than the things they were protesting. These discrediting techniques were to be repeated against other protestors in the years to follow.
CREATING A “CONSERVATIVE MOOD”
In the aftermath of the antiwar movement of the 1960s, the press was quick to announce a return to normalcy. Supposedly protests were passe and everyone had gone back to their private pursuits. By the mid1970s the news media were going so far as to proclaim that the nation was in a “conservative mood.” “The country is moving in the conservative direction ... surely,” intoned 'Washington Post columnist David Broder. And the New York Times talked about opinion “swinging to the right.”2
Press commentators pointed to students who now struggled for grades instead of for revolution. They noted the conservative victories in a number of state legislatures against the Equal Rights Amendment, against abortion, and for the death penalty, and the widespread resistance in local communities to school busing for racial balance. Ultraright leaders became familiar faces in the news. New conservative columnists and TV and radio commentators were hired to bolster the old stock. Some liberal intellectuals now declared themselves to be neo-conservatives.
With the advent of the 1980s and the landslide elections of a conservative president like Ronald Reagan, the press more vigorously than ever emphasized the conservative “drift” of the nation. Claiming to have discovered a conservative mood, the press helped create the impression that one existed. In doing so, it had to overlook a great deal about
COLLAPSING RIGHTWARD
Many liberal politicians collapsed before the rightist assault. There was a void (or an echo) in the places where journalists were accustomed to finding liberal responses to conservative voices. Farther left, the activist groups of the 1960s had ceased being newsworthy... .
The conservative myth reinforced itself by affecting reporters’ choices of sources. In a time of putatively surging conservatism, journalists may have perceived spokespersons on the left as irrelevant or naive. As these delegitimized sources were consulted less frequently, liberal proposals and interpretations received less coverage, and those on the right obtained relatively greater emphasis. Moreover, the location of the allimportant center, to which editors cleave and by which reporters set their bearings, was perceived as having shifted rightward. Positions and politicians once thought too conservative became a part of the respectable mainstream; contrast the treatment of Barry Goldwater during the liberal heyday of 1964 with Ronald Reagan 16 years later.
David Paletz and Robert Entman, Media Power Politics (New York: Free Press, 1981), p. 201.
the 1970s and 1980s, including the various polls that showed a shift in a progressive direction on such issues as military spending, the arms race, environmental protection, care for the elderly, taxation, race relations, housing, jobs, and occupational safety.3
During the 1970s and 1980s there were major strikes and demonstrations by workers in various industries. Environmental, consumer, and other public interest groups continued to pit themselves against the giant companies, while peace organizations throughout the nation launched mass protests against military spending and the nuclear arms race. There were large demonstrations against the repressive regimes of South Africa, Chile, El Salvador, and a dozen other US-supported dictatorships. There were rallies and civil disobedience actions at nuclear sites and against unsafe nuclear plants. Scores of college campuses witnessed strikes, sit-ins, and arrests over such issues as university investment policies, the firing of radical professors, cuts in ethnic minority studies and women’s studies, and questions of university governance.
These protest activities either went unreported in the national media or were given only passing and usually negative mention. In the face of substantial evidence to the contrary, and with a single-mindedness that—were it to occur in a country with a leftist government—would be taken as evidence of a controlled press, the media treated dissent and activism pretty much as a thing of the past.
By giving uncritical credence to the myth of a conservative mood, the press not only happened to misreport public opinion but helped frame issues in a way favorable to conservatives. By crediting conservative policies with a popular support they usually did not have, the press did its part in shifting the political agenda in a rightward direction. Public opinion is not just an expression of sentiment; it is a democratic power resource that sometimes constrains and directs policymakers who otherwise spend their time responding to the demands
and enticements of moneyed interests. “By misrepresenting public opinion, by emphasizing some opinions at the expense of others, the press deprives the unorganized masses of some of their potential power. The media short-circuit the process by which public preference may otherwise be translated into government policy.”4
In addition, the myth of a conservative mood helps create a self-fulfilling prophecy. If the media keep telling us that times are favorable for conservative politics, people begin to believe it and act accordingly. Right-wing candidates thrust themselves forward more aggressively, readily attracting volunteers and big contributors. Liberals are perceived, and maybe even perceive themselves, as out of step with the times. They shy away from “risky” issues and drift to the right. Given the media-created climate of opinion, fewer political leaders become willing or able to challenge the “conservative mood.”
Red-baiting is one time-tested technique for discrediting those who struggle for equitable social and economic relations. And one of the most adept red-baiters was Ronald Reagan, who enjoyed the high visibility advantage of occupying the White House and having his utterances dutifully transmitted to the American public by the national media. In 1982 President Reagan described the nuclear freeze campaign that was sweeping across the country as instigated and manipulated by “foreign agents,” who “want the weakening of America.” When asked to elaborate, he backed off because “I don’t discuss intelligence matters.” A White House spokesperson later announced that “documentation” of the president’s charges could be found in two conservative publications, the American Spectator and Commentary, and in the October issue of the Reader’s Digest.5
Inventing Reality Page 13