How Writing Off the Working Class Has Hurt the Mainstream Media (and the working class)

[CousinIT]

https://www.niemanlab.org/2019/08/how-writing-off-the-working-class-has-hurt-the-mainstream-media/

Today there are just six full-time labor reporters in the top 25 newspapers across the U.S., none in network or cable news, none at NPR or PBS, and just a few at digital news organizations and magazines on the left. What happened?

By the late 1960s and early 1970s, newspaper companies, then becoming publicly-traded, bigger chains, moved to a new business trajectory that changed the target news audience from mass to upscale, and altered the actual news narratives about the working class in US journalism.

. . .

The upscale focus of the news upset the status of labor unions and upended politics through the last third of the twentieth century and beyond. The mainstream news media’s write-off of the working class set the conditions for the decline of labor and working class news and the rise of a deeply partisan conservative media that hailed the abandoned white, working-class audience. (Working-class women and people of color had no similar emergent news media platform to pursue them as an audience.) The right wing then attacked the upscale-focused mainstream news media as “elite” and ultimately as “the enemy of the people.” Given this politicized media infrastructure, the “surprise” of a Donald Trump presidency seems much less of one.

This has left us with two problematic ways in which the news has covered the working class for the last several decades. First, the news media usually look at the working class only through the lens of a political news story, not through the lens of a labor or workplace story. Second, the news media typically consider the “working class” not in its entirety, but just in the stereotypical white male form, which nicely serves the purposes of divisive politicians who seek to exploit this image and divide working-class people on every other dimension: race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and citizenship.

Yet the whole of the working class is hardly ever presented or imagined by the US news media. This is a nation of people with all kinds of collars. Service-sector jobs account for 80.3 percent of jobs; manufacturing, construction, and mining—the types of jobs Trump regularly cites for his economic objectives—make up only 12.6 percent, about the same percentage as health care and social assistance (part of the service sector), the fastest-growing employment category. People of all races, genders, and political persuasions inhabit the working class, and they exist as real people, not just occasionally visible and selectively cast props for presidential campaigns. But with few exceptions, America’s working class is invisible, deemed no longer newsworthy.

My concern is about journalism’s future as an inclusive social practice. Journalism critics Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel offer a moral compass in their indispensable book The Elements of Journalism: “If we think of journalism as social cartography, the map should include news of all our communities, not just those with attractive demographics or strong appeal to advertisers.” Unfortunately, journalism’s “map” for years has been exclusive, consigning working-class people and their communities to obscurity—a class-based redlining of the news audience, the same people Hap Ward would call their readers, the wage earners.

[Prosper]

1. We can absorb some of the blame for discrediting labor.

A high school graduation ceremony celebrates a valedictorian in front of an audience relegated to non achievers. Threatening flipping burgers to inspire academics. Promising success to working hard enough while over looking the importance of skills, talent, intelligence and luck. Using hourly labor careers as the last resort.