The nasty bias in business journalism

Liz Ryan writes for The Huffington Post about what she calls the nasty bias in business journalism — the lack of coverage about the people who work at companies.

Ryan writes, “People move the numbers. People build the products and have the ahas and design the supply chains. Without human mojo and pixie dust, we’ve got nothing, but the public business conversation denies that inescapable reality. People are meaty, earthy, milky, warm and wise. They power everything that happens in business, but we leave them out of the story and the equation. We don’t send journalists looking for data to support the idea that paying executives tons of money is good for productivity. We take it as an article of faith.

“I once had an editor of a big-city daily tell me that he couldn’t run my story (gently chastising a large employer for lying to its employees about a company HQ move — and looking back, I’m not sure why I was gentle about it) because the employer could turn out to be a big advertiser in the paper. I think that was an aberration — I don’t think it’s a fear of employer retribution (in the form of pulled ads) that makes business-page editors so weenified. I think it’s one of those unexamined American frames, just the way things are, never discussed, never considered through another lens, not even around the business-page editorial table.

“If we can’t say how a theme or a notion helps corporations make more money (pumping milk at work, for example, or reversing the steady mechanization of people at work that started with time-and-motion studies and continues through tighter and tighter turns of the screws in American workplaces every day) then there’s simply nothing to say about it.

“That’s wrong. It’s not responsible journalism, but more than that, it’s not responsible citizenship.”

Read more here.