Why major news organizations bury worker stories

Tom Cantlon of DCReport.org writes about the lack of labor coverage at major news organizations.

Cantlon reports, “The New York Times has no labor section. If you search for labor news it connects to stories tagged as “Labor Role In Politics”. Recent stories list almost nothing truly worker focused. They are about the controversies the Secretary of Labor has generated, or they are incidental like sports stories with some labor component, or they are from a business perspective.

“That’s true across the board, the labor news is in the business section and from a business perspective. Stories about the cost of labor and whether that’s going to affect corporate profits.

“The Washington Post has no labor section but does have a jobs section, which is a classified type list of jobs. No specific labor news. CNN has mostly labor news from a business perspective in the business section. A search of MSNow has few real labor stories, maybe one a month. FoxNews has almost no recent stories other than one sports related and one negative story about a union. Ironically one of the few big news sources with labor stories is part of Bloomberg News. Ironic because Bloomberg has always been business focused. But even in this case it’s not up front where the typical news consumer would see it. It’s in a specialized sub-site for law related news and gives stories about court cases related to labor, or news about laws proposed or changing.

“So what should be in a labor news section? How about stories on the progress of any campaigns around the country to form unions. They might be small, local groups trying to form a union, but what’s new in their efforts? How will Federal Reserve decisions about fighting inflation affect the typical paycheck? Which state legislators around the country are trying to get legislation through that would be helpful to working people?”

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