TV news ignores labor coverage

A study examining national TV networks’ coverage of unions and the labor movement across three years found that the media largely ignores labor, except to paint unions as a source of trouble in the American economy.

“Even in stories about labor or unions, the main sources relied on are external to labor or unions,” writes professor Federico Subervi in a summary of the report. “Moreover, the discourse and framing continues to fault the workers and their representatives for any conflict or impasse, not the business, company or government.”

Subervi’s report was commissioned by The Newspaper Guild-CWA. Subervi is the director of the Center for the Study of Latino Media & Markets at the School of Journalism and Communications at Texas State University.

To conduct the study, researchers accessed the Vanderbilt University Television News Archives, which offer an online searchable database of news headlines and abstracts of news programs. The study focused on ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN.

Ultimately, over three years – 2008, 2009 and 2011 —  researchers  identified a total of only 141 stories among the four networks that focused on labor either primarily or secondarily. “Estimating that these networks collectively air approximately 16,000 news stories per year, the 141 news items about labor/unions represent less than .3 percent of their news inventory for the studied time period,” Subervi writes.

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