Sunday, April 5, 2020

The Invisibles - the Working Class

“No Longer Newsworthy – How the Mainstream Media Abandoned the Working Class,” by Christopher Martin, 2019

I learned most of what I needed to know about journalism the day my high school editor and teacher censored a story I had written about a local radio station, which shed light on the station’s exclusive search for profits.

But there is always more to learn.  This is an excellent dissection of the newspaper industry and its turn away from a mass working-class readership towards professional-strata and managerial elites.  Martin looks at the rise and fall of labor reporters, who at one time were valued journalists covering unions, strikes and collective bargaining, to be replaced by workplace ‘lifestyle’ angles.  He has statistics on the frequency of pro-labor words in news slowly disappearing and individualist, careerist phrases substituting.  He details the change-over from publisher-owned newspapers to corporate and hedge fund-owned newspapers solely oriented towards shareholders and profits, which resulted in layoffs and news changes.  In this section he names publishers, papers and chains by name.  He examines Editor & Publisher (E&P), the bible of the newspaper industry and how various newspapers’ promotions changed over the years to reflect upper-income target audiences, with 1970 his ‘turn’ date. Martin tracks how newspapers changed the way they depicted transit strikes from sympathy or factuality to fore-grounding consumer traveler irritations and anger.

Because of the resulting ideological class gap due to these changes, Martin thinks this gave right-wing media a chance to make their culture-war appeals to lower-income or blue collar workers. The industry also never realized their declining circulation might have something to do with their bland, upscale focus.  Martin does not highlight the changing class background of many of the reporters themselves, nor the 6 media companies that control most of the media in the U.S.  Yet it is basically a story of the complete seizure of the U.S. newspaper industry by neo-liberal capitalism.  Of course much of this can be applied to television news too.  Anyone in journalism, in J-school or who reads a newspaper needs to get this book.  It is a good companion to Manufacturing Consent by N. Chomsky.

Details, Details

Martin has a wealth of vivid details fleshing out this story which culminated in the election of Trump in 2016.  The question that petit-bourgeois elites were asking was, where did these formerly invisible people come from?  As part of his analysis, he takes apart the 2016 election in Iowa, where many counties switched from Obama to Trump, with Clinton only winning the most populous 5 counties.  Trump had echoed some of the same themes that Sanders had about NAFTA and the working class. 12% of Sanders primary voters switched to Trump as a result. The Des Moines Register endorsed Clinton, one of 57 out of 100 top newspapers to do so, while only 2 endorsed Trump. The Register’s own statistics show their readership to have 10% more college degrees than Iowa’s population as a whole. Martin mentions that the recovery from 2008 had not hit Iowa’s rural counties, which are the vast majority in the state.  Similar facts could probably be cited in Wisconsin, in Michigan, in Ohio.  The ‘press’ had lost its influence because they ignored economic and social reality for the majority of people.  And the working class is the majority, though Martin does not have a very precise definition of the working class.

Picture Opportunity. But 500+ Still Got Laid-Off

In detail, Martin dissects the Indiana Carrier layoffs that Trump made so much out of during the campaign.  He shows how the press ignored the real facts, as, like Trump, many of the reporters couldn’t tell a furnace from an air conditioner.  They did not look into Trump’s claims to save jobs in detail, and dropped the story before many Carrier jobs were lost to Mexico in the same plant, along with other plant shutdowns nearby.  He also looks into the press’s treatment of the Hostess Brands bankruptcy in 2011, which ignored management fuckups, the intervention of vulture hedge funds and the many concessions unions made to keep the firm afloat.  Instead reporters dwelt on the public’s love of diabetic Twinkies©. I.E. the consumer is the one hurt and unions are to blame.  He also scans the coverage of the recent wave of teacher’s strikes, which highlighted how little coverage there had been before.  Some newspapers are so lacking in knowledge about labor that they wouldn’t know a two-tier pay scale, low wages or corporate incompetence if it bit them on the ass.

Martin knows that language frames journalism – journalism is not objective reality, it is a narrative story.  He notes astutely that newspapers use terms like ‘middle class’ or ‘working families’ or employee, substituting for ‘workers’ or ‘working-class.’ Noticeably, the union movement has also made this retrograde step.  There is even a ‘3rd’ party that is called the 'Working Families Party,' a name that avoids class, introducing a cultural component appealing to the right.  You see, every worker does not have a ‘family’ or children.  This hints that the politics of the fake-independent WFP are a left-shadow of the Democratic Party.  And indeed they are.  Martin also investigates the use of the Republican phrase ‘job killer’ and its use by 4 mainstream news organizations - the AP, New York Times, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal.  In the period he looked at it was misused in news stories without verification 91.6% of the time. This is how ‘news’ becomes propaganda.

Martin skewers the clichés drizzled out by newspapers when workers go on strike, especially transit strikes.  The most popular are photos of people sleeping in airports, stuck in traffic jams or walking disgustedly to work.  A little boy with his dreams shattered features prominently.  The commuters or travelers are always quoted and they are angry or irritated or inconvenienced.  If a commuter or traveler told a reporter that they supported the strike, you would likely not get quoted.

One of the most revealing is how the NYT was one of the first to trumpet their monied readership in E&P. While many earlier papers promoted their wide demographic reach and had some sympathy for the working class (exempting African Americans of course), the Times wet their pants over how wealthy, employed, educated and tuned into the stock market and consumption their readers were.  As Martin points out, ‘consumer’ has replaced ‘citizen’ in mainstream journalism due to the control of advertisers.

A useful pro-union book to background what has happened to journalism, which is now populated by too many blow-dried, elitist talking heads or rightist or centrist editors that, as Greenwald says, serve as stenographers to power.

Other prior reviews on journalism and language, use blog search box, upper left:  “Manufacturing Consent” (Chomsky-Herman), “When Journalism Was a Thing,” “The Post,” “Southern Cultural Nationalism,” “Empire of Illusion” (Hedges), "Understanding Class," “Keywords - the New Language of Capitalism,” “Propaganda” (Bernays), “Advertising Shit in Your Head,” “Psychology and Capitalism,” “Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television,” “Turning off NPR,” “Kill the Messenger,” “NPR Completes Editorial Assassination,” “Doublespeak” “Arundhati Roy...on Minnesota Public Radio.”

And I bought it at May Day Books!
Red Frog
April 5, 2020

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