More on the demise of labor reporting

The firing of BusinessWeek labor reporter Aaron Bernstein after more than two decades of work at the publication and several major journalism awards is again being used by other journalists to lament the demise of such coverage. Earlier this week, The New Republic’s John Judis wrote about Bernstein’s departure from the glossy.

At the Washington Monthly, Kevin Drum wrote, “The labor beat at daily newspapers has been on the verge of extinction for years. My local paper, the LA Times, used to have some of the best labor coverage in the country, thanks to its great labor beat reporter, Harry Bernstein, but that heritage declined and then finally died last year when labor writer Nancy Cleeland left the beat.”

Later, after discussing Bernstein, Drum added, “As labor unions decline in power and advertisers insist ever more vigorously on appealing to specific demographics (young, white collar, lots of disposable income), coverage of blue collar and working class issues simply fades away. It’s like this stuff doesn’t even exist anymore. And let’s face it: if all you read is BusinessWeek or your local daily, it doesn’t.”

Read more here. Meanwhile, former Mother Jones reporter Brad Plumer used the Bernstein issue to discuss the demise of labor reporting. He wrote, “FAIR delivered a similar indictment back in 1989, noting that few outlets employed a labor reporter, that newspapers rarely cover labor issues unless a strike is going on, and that labor coverage has been replaced by a ‘workplace beat’ investigating office gossip and the like. And it’s hard to ascribe all of this to a lack of interest. Cable outlets, after all, spend lavishly on corporate- and finance-oriented shows, even though most of them have earned piddling earnings since the stock market crash in 2001. Even PBS has no counterpart to Kudlow & Cramer.

“Anyway, we’re a far cry from the start of the 20th century, when Eugene Debs’ Appeal to Reason boasted a stunning 760,000 subscribers. Indeed, one of the last major labor-run publications, the Racine Labor–often held up as a model for other aspiring labor papers to emulate–closed down in 2002. Anyway, people can debate causes all day, but it’s hard to imagine that the decline of labor coverage hasn’t had a negative effect on unions–or the labor movement in general.”

Read more here.