Book Review: Framed Highlights Media Ignorance of Unions

The decline of media coverage related to labor and unions has been well documented in academic journals and mainstream publications.

During the past 40 years, many newspapers and magazines have dropped labor as a full-time beat, instead spending their time covering other business-related issues or believing that coverage of "workplace issues" accomplished the same goal for readers.

In Framed: Labor and the Corporate Media, author Christopher R. Martin takes our understanding of how the media have ignored labor and union coverage a step further by persuasively arguing that stories of major labor issues since the early 1990s have been framed as "consumer" issues while ignoring the actual concerns of the union workforce.

As labor reporting stands today, it is a minor part of business journalism despite the fact that 12.9 percent of all working people in the United States belong to a union, according to U.S. Department of Labor statistics. That percentage is down from a high in the 1950s, when approximately one-third of all workers belonged to a union.

The decline in overall union membership has led to the closure of hundreds of labor publications, including the 2002 demise of the Racine Labor, a Wisconsin newspaper that existed for 60 years and provided an alternative to the local newspaper. And while the mainstream media has been criticized for ignoring good labor stories, there hasn't been any movement to add coverage.

William Serrin, a former New York Times labor reporter and now a journalism professor at New York University, has noted that newspapers don't write about labor and unions anymore because it's a topic in which editors have scant interest.

Martin argues that the "framing" of U.S. labor coverage occurs through five means: 1. The consumer is king; 2. The process of production is none of the public's business; 3. The economy is driven by great business leaders and entrepreneurs; 4. The workplace is a meritocracy; and 5. Collection economic action is bad. He also notes that corporate ownership of most media has led to a hostile relationship between unions and media outlets. None of those frames has anything to do with the plight of the worker, he added.

The author, a communication studies professor at the University of Northern Iowa, assessed how the three major television networks, USA Today and The Times covered five major labor issues in the 1990s -- the closing of a Michigan General Motors plant, the American Airlines flight attendant strike, the 1994-95 baseball strike, the United Parcel Service strike and the World Trade Organization protests. In each case, Martin concludes that media coverage predominantly focused on the effects on consumers and ignored the working conditions of employees.

Such coverage is considered objective, but hurts readers as well as workers, Martin said. "By addressing all of us as consumers, the news media diminish citizenship to mere purchasing behavior," he wrote. "Our 'rights' as consumers concern the price, quality, and immediacy of consumerable goods and services."

Particularly galling for business journalism is Martin's ability to show the media's neglect in remembering what it had written about past labor issues. In the coverage of the GM plant closing in Ypsilanti, Mich., it was reported that the company wouldn't consider tax breaks by government agencies when deciding which plants to close. Yet when a Texas plant was picked to remain open over the Michigan plant, coverage focused on tax incentives, and the media neglected to ask the company about this change in strategy because, Martin reasoned, it didn't fit into its preconceived "frames" of how the story should have been written.

The five "frames" with which the media have assessed labor and union stories also left it unprepared to adequately cover the 1997 UPS strike, a major victory for organized labor, and the 1999 World Trade Organization protests in Seattle. The media failed to grasp why the general public supported the strike and neglected to adequately report the reasons behind the protests.

Martin concludes that labor is only successful in getting its message across in the media when it can link the media framing of "consumption" to "production" -- how products or services are made or provided.

There is perhaps no part of business journalism that needs to be re-examined more than labor reporting. Some experts believe that BusinessWeek, The Times and The Wall Street Journal are the only media outlets that cover labor extensively -- and Martin effectively shows that The Times doesn't always do it effectively. Yet open any other printed media or watch the nightly news and you'll rarely see a story about labor -- unless, as Martin points out, there is a strike in which consumers are inconvenienced.

With more than 15 million potential readers belonging to unions, maybe the media needs to go back and revisit the past -- primarily the past of the labor newspapers in the late 19th and early 20th centuries -- and look at how labor was once covered and consider adding more stories. These stories, Martin notes, shouldn't just focus on the consumer, but should provide an overview of issues workers face.

Copyright © 2008 Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism