Categories: OLD Media Moves

SF Chronicle's anti-union headline

Randy Shaw writes on the BeyondChron blog that the San Francisco Chronicle’s Aug. 14 Business section headline, “Union rejected at papers,� had a decidedly anti-union tone.

Shaw wrote, “A reader would logically conclude that workers at a local newspaper voted against union representation. But the subheadline and the article itself revealed the far different, and more ominous truth: as the Berkeley Daily Planet headline put it, ‘Media News Ends Newsroom’s Union’s Status.’ What the Chronicle headline wanted to frame as workers rejecting a union was actually a classic tale of union-busting. And the union-buster–the Media News Group– is a financial partner of the Chronicle’s parent company, the Hearst Corporation. Think that relationship affected the paper’s coverage?

“When Media News Group—which controls every Bay Area daily newspaper but the SF Chronicle and Examiner—busted its union at five papers including the Oakland Tribune, it would seem to be a front-page story. But in the Chronicle, the story was relegated to the business page, with a misleading headline that led readers to think that it was the workers who rejected unionization, not the corporate media giant.

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.

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