Why the media need to start covering the labor story

University of Northern Iowa professor Christopher R. Martin writes for Nieman Reports about how the media needs to turn back to covering the labor beat.

Martin writes, “The upscale focus of the news upset the status of labor unions and upended politics through the last third of the twentieth century and beyond. The mainstream news media’s write-off of the working class set the conditions for the decline of labor and working class news and the rise of a deeply partisan conservative media that hailed the abandoned white, working-class audience. (Working-class women and people of color had no similar emergent news media platform to pursue them as an audience.) The right wing then attacked the upscale-focused mainstream news media as ‘elite’ and ultimately as ‘the enemy of the people.’ Given this politicized media infrastructure, the ‘surprise’ of a Donald Trump presidency seems much less of one.

“This has left us with two problematic ways in which the news has covered the working class for the last several decades. First, the news media usually look at the working class only through the lens of a political news story, not through the lens of a labor or workplace story. Second, the news media typically consider the ‘working class’ not in its entirety, but just in the stereotypical white male form, which nicely serves the purposes of divisive politicians who seek to exploit this image and divide working-class people on every other dimension: race, gender, sexual orientation, disability, and citizenship.”

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