While click-happy articles about Stormy Daniels and Russia continue to dominate traditional news, people-powered labor movements like the teachers’ strikes in West Virginia have received late, scant, or downright poor coverage. Just how poor was it? Fairness & Accuracy in the Media (FAIR) did a breakdown of how traditional media outlets like the New York Times, CNN, Fox News,* and others handled the recent big deal teacher’s strike in West Virginia. One of the main issues regarding labor coverage is a lack of resources spent. A part of this problem comes from how gutted labor has been over the past few decades by right-to-work laws. But a larger part of this problem is related to corporate news culture. Labor disputes are not seen in their historic context and treated as isolated incidents, degrading them of their importance.
Not surprisingly, dedicating staff to reporting on labor issues seemed to correlate with earlier coverage of the West Virginia teachers’ strike. The Huffington Post ran its first story on West Virginia teachers’ pay issues in early February and had its second story—on a smaller, one-day walkout—the week before the statewide strike began. The Times, Bloomberg and the Washington Post all had on-the-ground reports by the strike’s second day.
By contrast, the three broadcast networks, CNN and MSNBC took several more days before their first, in-house coverage. Fox News and Politico, despite the latter’s labor beat, brought up the rear, essentially foregoing any real coverage until the strike was all but resolved. (Worth noting: Politico did mention the strike every day from its inception in a daily news brief and, curiously, neither the Times’ nor Washington Post’s labor reporters wrote a single story about the two-week-long strike, which was covered by other reporters at those papers.)
This leads to weak coverage, catch-up coverage, and thin coverage that does not truly explore the reasons a teachers union—and now many teachers’ unions across the country—are becoming more and more activated to draw lines in the sand when it comes to negotiating their contracts.
The Times, which routinely drives TV and radio news choices, supplemented its coverage with six editorials during the second week of the strike, pushing the issue beyond the news pages and into the broader discourse. CBS, NBC and ABC News had all run multiple segments on the strike on their evening news and morning broadcasts by the second week. CNN went hard into the story, with numerous, on-the-ground reports and segments that dug into the pay and healthcare cost issues prompting the strike.
Others, however, still lagged far behind. Politico’s lack of interest in a story without a DC-insider angle was palpable; it ran just two news articles over two weeks. MSNBC’s belated and subdued news interest was perhaps the most striking. As FAIR (3/2/18) has pointed out, the “liberal” cable network’s high-profile primetime hosts completely ignored the strike well into its second week. And the Journal’s early coverage fizzled out, too. Of note, over the second weekend of the strike, the Journal’s reporter left West Virginia for western Pennsylvania, to write up yet another Trump-supporter profile story about the president’s recently announced steel tariffs.
The important thing to note here is that these outlets are not simply following their revenue streams. This is not just the “invisible hand” of the market and demand for more sensational news driving them. They are making choices to write on issues that redirect resources from more important stories. Trump supporter profiles are done. If the New York Times wanted to write stories about people every other day, they could choose families affected by this administration’s racist immigration policies and deportation schemes. Instead, they keep rewriting the same story about Trump supporters.
Save the reporter and the ink. We have run out of needing to know what Trump supporters think. It’s very simple: they don’t believe things they are being told by traditional media outlets are true, and they are too stubborn to admit they were scammed for the 50th year in a row by the Republican Party. Fine. The people who want to talk to news outlets about supporting Trump say that very same thing.
As corporate greed reaches what one can only hope is its zenith, traditional newsrooms have begun to organize. It will be interesting to see if these more corporate, traditional news outlets begin to change their approach by expanding their understanding of labor and its broad-reaching importance in every facet of American life.
*I know, I know.