“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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