Money Matters

excerpted from the book

Unreliable Sources

a guide to detecting bias in news media

by Martin A. Lee & Norman Solomon

A Lyle Stuart Book, Carol Publishing Group, 1990

p176

"The lesson is this: In a nation of people with ambitions to be affluent themselves, someday, class warfare does not sell."

So wrote a reporter for the Christian Science Monitor, in a news article about politics and the capital gains tax. Two days earlier a news headline in the Washington Post presented the identical conclusion: "Tax Fight's Class War Rhetoric Was at Odds With American Dream." Both newspapers were summing up the considered judgment of American mass media, owned by rich people who are notably unenthusiastic about anything that smacks of class warfare against the privileged.

The wealthy are not immune from criticism in the media, of course. Everyone knows that a good deal of resentment against the rich exists in American society. Some may be selectively lampooned as overly greedy, intemperate or personally flawed. Mass media channel those ill feelings toward individuals rather than toward the system that produces multimillionaires and corporate concentration of riches. We may be encouraged to dislike or scorn specific tycoons (though not nearly as often as hype promulgates admiration of the super rich). However, major media do little to probe how inordinate wealth and power are undermining democratic possibilities. Newsweek chose a vituperative (and sexist) title for its cover story on hotel billionairess Leona Helmsley-"Rhymes With Rich"-but the article condemned her personal cruelties, not her class position.

With so many advertisers preferring a well-heeled audience, composed of people less interested in lower-income communities than their own pursuits, the news media drift is toward upper-class concerns. In the general news media, it is considered gauche to expose the competing class interests; instead, the "A" sections of newspapers overlay economic topics with thick veneers of euphemism and myth. Business sections are somewhat more candid. The Wall Street Journal (owned by Dow Jones & Co.), informing a business world that depends on factual data, is still more straightforward. (The Journal also provides quality news articles about the role of big money in electoral politics-something we don't often see in daily papers or on TV news.) And perhaps most honest are conservative economic periodicals such as Barron's (also owned by Dow Jones), which make no bones about serving profit-hungry elites.

Rich versus poor

When the Census Bureau comes out with periodic reports on wide income gaps, the media provide fleeting reports-one-day stories that quickly sink into the ocean of news. And facts about class divisions are often buried. After the Census Bureau released 1986 income data, a Washington Post account included a quote from Robert Greenstein, director of the nonprofit

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, who said the data reflected the fact that "The gap between the rich and the middle class and the rich and the poor has now reached its widest point in at least 40 years." The quotation came in the article's tenth paragraph, appearing on page A15. But the article had begun on the front page, under the upbeat headline: "Number of Poor Americans at Lowest Level Since 1980."

Most journalists are reluctant to draw attention to wide economic divisions that should be patently obvious to everybody. "Class difference in the United States has so far been the great, undiscussed elephant in the national living room," says San Francisco writer Ann Bartz. In recent years the stratification has worsened. Author Barbara Ehrenreich comments that U.S. "income distribution is now almost as perilously skewed as that of India."

Nevertheless, "class conflict" is a media no-no. To be accused of encouraging it is a damning indictment. Americans are supposed to strive to be one big happy family, even if some of the brothers and sisters are driving new Porsches and Cadillacs while others have no home. When convenient, politicians and mass media invoke family metaphors for the entire society, although it would be an odd family indeed that would allow some of its members to feast in luxury at the dinner table next to others with mere scraps on their plates.

Jesse Jackson has been one of the few people able to reach a large national audience while raising issues of basic fairness. In the United States, "most of the poor are not black and brown as projected in the media," he said in a May 1989 speech. "Of the 40 million poor, 29 million are white. The poor are mostly white, female and young. But whether white, black or brown, hunger hurts. When a baby cries out at midnight after having gone to bed supper-less, it doesn't cry race, sex or religion; it cries in pain. Somebody must hear the crying babies."

On matters of poverty and wealth, America's mass media are sluggish about emphasizing realities in human terms. "The problem with economic news today is that most of it comes from economists," says author Hazel Henderson. "And economists are trained to deal with statistics, not with people." When journalists refer to the impoverished, the human dimensions are frequently submerged, as Barbara Wien of the Institute for Policy Studies noted: "The detached and abstracted manner in which television talk shows like Wall Street Week in Review report economic news means that we never learn about the fundamental causes and human impact of certain policy choices."

Worthy and unworthy earthquake victims

Even reporting on natural disasters often involves biases that make some victims of tragedy more important than others. The powerful earthquake that struck Northern California on October 17, 1989, brought many days of intense national publicity to the upper-crust Marina district of San Francisco. But where poor neighborhoods suffered severe damage elsewhere in the Bay area, media coverage was minimal. The anguish of black residents in West Oakland, for instance, got comparatively little press. And, a two-hour drive south, the devastation that displaced hundreds of families in Watsonville was a belated and minor story.

With several days to gather material, the three newsweeklies totally ignored the many hundreds of impoverished Latino people who'd suddenly lost their homes. In more than a dozen pages of coverage, Time's only mention of Watsonville was that "the Bake-Rite Bakery caved in, fatally smashing a passerby"; the magazine's extensive photo spread included one picture from the town-a damaged church-with a caption, "Watsonville: St. Patrick's lost bricks, but not its cross." Newsweek skipped Watsonville entirely. So did U.S. News & World Report.

More than insulting, journalistic prejudices had the effect of diverting aid from communities deemed less newsworthy. Well-meaning TV viewers, and relief agencies, were inclined to earmark donations for publicized areas. "The Red Cross only will go to where the media is, the rich white areas," charged Raul Ramirez, a frustrated volunteer in Watsonville. The executive director of the city's Chamber of Commerce and Agriculture, Charlene Shaffer, was a bit more diplomatic, but sounded just as upset. "It's distressing to see hard-hit communities near the quake's epicenter...being overshadowed by the Bay area in the media's coverage," she complained. "Watsonville Community Hospital has sustained millions of dollars in damage and the economic vitality of the entire community has been jeopardized by the $325 million in damage to local businesses. Donations, which could make the difference between economic survival and devastation to a small community like ours, are pouring into San Francisco instead..."

Doing numbers on poverty

The media's numbers don't always add up. In fact, they're apt to downplay the extent of destitution. A district court concluded that the 1980 census had omitted about three-quarters of a million poor people in New York City alone. The media draw heavily on data from the Census Bureau, which undercounts the poor: English-language forms sometimes get sent to Hispanic neighborhoods; census takers may choose not to enter high-crime neighborhoods; inadequate effort goes into surveying undocumented immigrants and homeless people.

Even while understating the extent of deprivation nationwide, government statistics are staggering. In late 1989, a federal report pegged the official rate of poverty at 13.1 percent-which amounted to 31.9 million Americans. On Capitol Hill, the Joint Economic Committee said that in light of changes in economic conditions since the poverty-line was defined in the 1960s, the true number of impoverished Americans now would be 58 million people-a quarter of the entire population. And across the board, young people are hit hardest. Two-fifths of America's poor are children; half a million of those kids are homeless.

Such poverty statistics, while sometimes noted, are not pointedly matched with the other pole-inordinate wealth. The media customarily portray extremities of privation and riches as totally separate matters. And while news reports sometimes refer to a "working class," reference to a U.S. "ruling class" is a mass media taboo. The press is much better at identifying class hierarchies overseas. Although a New York Times news headline declared that "Japan's Ruling Elite Faces a Fed-up People," the Times and other American mass media avoid so bluntly identifying a "ruling elite" in the United States.

On occasion, media reports do go beyond wooden and detached accounts. A hard-hitting PBS documentary that aired in spring 1989, "Babies at Risk," showed areas of Chicago where "the rate of infant death is worse than in many Third World countries." Later in the year Newsweek published four pages of moving photos and text by author and activist Jonathan Kozol, who pointed out that "the gulf in income between rich and poor American families is wider than at any time since figures were recorded, starting in the 1940s." Also at a new record was "the gap between white and black mortality in children... Black children are more than twice as likely to die in infancy as whites-nine times as likely to be neurologically impaired." With federal housing funds sharply cut during the 1980s, "homeless children were seen begging in the streets of major cities for the first time since the Great Depression a fivefold increase in homeless children was seen in Washington, D.C., in 1986 alone. By 1987 nearly half the occupants of homeless shelters in New York City were children. The average homeless child was only six years old."

Kozol called for drastic changes in priorities, noting that routine economics "condemns the children of the very poor to the implacable inheritance of a diminished destiny." But his appeals seemed doomed to be unheeded as the 1990s got underway, for reasons including the fact that his article was exceptional for a large-circulation magazine

Mass media do not hesitate to declare crises. There are recurring hostage, energy, drug, and international crises of various stripes. But the preventable suffering of millions of children within our own borders is not a bona fide media crisis. Such a judgment was implicit when the New York Times, in its editorial on President Bush's first 100 days in office, stated categorically that "no national emergencies confront him at home." Powerful editors may have felt that way, but such a complacent declaration would be news to millions of Americans.

ECONOMIC FOLKLORE: TAXES, SOCIAL SECURITY AND THE AMERICAN DREAM

Reaganomics enriched the already-rich, at the expense of most Americans. But, on the whole, that is not what mass media told us. Soon after Ronald Reagan moved into the White House, no less a mainstream authority than James Reston declared in the New York Times that Reagan's economic program amounted to a "serious attempt...to spread the sacrifices equally across all segments of society." Media heavies like Reston were very helpful to administration strategists eager to obscure their class warfare from the top down. As right-wing activist Paul Weyrich commented in a moment of candor: "The rural people in West Virginia don't understand Reaganomics, and frankly, if they did, they wouldn't like it."

Most people don't look kindly on regressive taxation, a setup in which the tax burden falls as income rises. Acceptance has depended on political hocus-pocus abetted by mass media unwilling to openly state the tax-code favoritism doled out to the well-to-do. Journalistic jargon on tax proposals is convoluted enough to be widely befuddling. Throughout the 1980s media often called proposals for tax breaks to the wealthy "tax reform." This inversion of usual meaning led to other absurdities. The press even went on to describe advocates of higher taxes for the rich as enemies of the "reform" enacted during the Reagan years: With a Gallup/Times-Mirror poll showing 82 percent of U.S. citizens in favor of raising taxes on incomes of over $80,000 a year, the International Herald Tribune cited the survey as an indication of "anti-reform rumblings."

Showing intermittent sensitivity to the poor and consistent responsiveness to rich owners, journalists often use words without clarifying their meaning. "Recession," for instance, means more people will be out of work. "Consumer confidence" sounds very upbeat-and for business people it is, since it indicates customer willingness to buy expensive things-but it also means that ordinary people are going deeper into debt.

Certain media themes never grow too stale to be repeated in a big way. For example:

This is a land of opportunity.

Media play up those who have "made it" as object lessons for people who feel the crunch of basic living costs. The implication is that difficulties making ends meet are due to individual shortcomings, rather than government priorities or economic structures.

Blame-the-unemployed messages can be direct. In September 1989, USA Today opened up a phone hot line for job seekers. Most of the 9,560 callers "don't know beans" about looking for work, said the newspaper, which highlighted a quote from an "outplacement expert" who scolded: "They don't know what they want or how to go about getting it."

We're an in this together.

"Our political system works best when people focus on shared values," wrote a Newsweek columnist, who added: "Economic opportunity and striving-the promise of the American dream-is one such basic value. It cuts across religious, ethnic and class differences." Corporate America sounds similar themes in paid ads. In its customary "advertorial" spot on the New York Times op-ed page, Mobil shared a stirring homily just before Labor Day 1989, headlined "Here's to us." Between its Iyrical appreciation of "the panoply of race and color that makes this country such a fascinating place" and a closing quotation from Walt Whitman, the quarter-page Mobil ad got to the point: "This land, this country of ours, works."

What's most important is that we be aware of the poor and empathize with their plight.

This theme is most evident around holidays like Thanksgiving and Christmas, when countless news outlets urge donations to charity campaigns.

Whether the New York Times is entreating readers to "Remember the neediest!" or a small-town newspaper is promoting a similar effort, such rituals often include heart-wrenching photos of the poor.

But showing dire circumstances does not necessarily help change them. "Social problems are less revealed than obscured by depiction of their effects," writes media critic Jan Grover. She adds: "The homeless become so through enormously complex mechanisms involving real-estate speculation, the flight of U.S. industry abroad, declining blue-collar wages and decreasing federal and local social-service benefits, as well as by their own more personal griefs and failures. But few photographic representations of poverty include depictions of the people and practices responsible for an economy that makes housing the enormous burden to the poor that it is. When was the last time you saw a documentary about the poor that included photographs identifying slumlords and speculators as part of the problem?" The media approach is such that "we are more likely to view the poor as a spectacle and as victims than as people caught in a crunch that implicates us all."

What happens on the stock market is big news. What happens at food stamp, unemployment and welfare offices isn't.

No news broadcast is complete without a summary of the day's events on Wall Street. Yet only two percent of the public owns half of the country's individual stock and bond holdings. Most people in the market are very small investors. And 80 percent of Americans don't play the stock markets at all. (While nearly 50 million American workers have some indirect holdings via pension funds, they have no say in how the money is invested or any direct claim in the proceeds until they retire.) The emphasis on reporting every twitch of the Dow reflects media zeal for serving people with the spending capabilities sought by advertisers.

Every daily newspaper is filled with detailed listings of stock market closings. What's more, as economist Pamela Sparr has written, "many papers, magazines, radio and TV stations have collapsed most of their [economics] coverage into business sections geared for corporate executives and private investors." And that's whose worldview gets most faithfully presented in daily newsprint. Whenever a new report on the economy is issued, the news media busily quote government officials, economists, stock analysts employers and the like. "The financial pages of the newspapers of this country see the world through the eyes of bankers as opposed to through the eyes of bank customers," Philadelphia Inquirer reporter David Johnston told us.

Elitist media approaches to financial matters are typified by ABC's Nightline program. FAIR's study found that when shows dealt with economics, 20 percent concentrated on the stock market. Only 7.2 percent focused on labor topics. And the most frequent guests for programs on the economy were of a conservative bent: More than one out of three guests (37 percent) represented business, but only one in 20 (5.3 percent) spoke for labor. Other guests included government officials (15.4 percent), academics (13.9 percent) and journalists (12 percent). Under such circumstances, working people without social prestige are unlikely to get a word in edgewise.

The situation is no better on "public" broadcasting. PBS Television features Adam Smith's Money World and Wall Street Week, along with the Nightly Business Report. And in 1989, public radio from coast to coast began airing the daily half-hour Marketplace program-which added General Electric as an underwriter at the start of 1990, dutifully announcing GE's "We bring good things to life'' motto as part of every show. There are no comparable national programs devoted to labor or consumer interests. Even on the noncommercial networks, there's no business like dough business.

Widening gaps between the rich and poor are natural.

A Harris Poll in 1989 found 79 percent of Americans agreeing with the statement, "The rich get richer and the poor get poorer." Such trends are apt to be fairly evident based on firsthand observations. Yet the mass media rarely raise journalistic eyebrows or convey alarm at the economic disparities in the country, much less affix blame or demand substantial changes.

In spring 1989, the congressional House Ways and Means Committee came out with a report that the New York Times summarized this way: "From 1979 to 1987 the standard of living for the poorest fifth of the population fell by 9 percent. At the same time, the living standard of the top fifth rose by 19 percent." In a laughable front-page understatement, Times reporter Peter Passell went on to quickly interject that "the Reagan Administration was not entirely free of responsibility for the change." By the time the article got to its concluding paragraph, Passell and the Times were absolving those m power: "The actions of free markets and free people drove a giant wedge in the income distribution Government responded by not responding, in effect leaving the rich and the poor to fend for themselves."

To close its laissez-fairy tale, the Times news article might have added that the rich and poor were equally free to sleep under bridges and steal bread.

When money moves in, it's a good thing.

News media look favorably on the process of gentrification that fixes up run-down neighborhoods, driving rents up-and lower-income people out. A cover story in Time described the gentrifiers as "democratically inspired." Said the magazine: "It is the hurly burly pleasures of democracy-pluralism incarnate-that pulled Americans back downtown." Of course, the end result of gentrification is upscale uniformity, not pluralism or democracy.

The motives of developers are anything but altruistic. "It is easier to see people moving in and out of neighborhoods than it is to see capital moving in and out, investment and disinvestment in a neighborhood," says Neil Smith a Rutgers University professor of urban geography. "The mobility of capital-not people-is the key to urban change. But very few reporters make the connection between the movement of capital and the forced displacement of poor and minority households."

Large amounts of newspaper ad revenues come from landowners and developers in a metropolitan area. And realtors often sit on media company boards of directors. So it was no surprise to informed observers when the New York Times-years after canceling the Sidney Schanberg column so distasteful to the city's real estate interests-was still condemning rent control. One of many Times editorials defending the rights of landlords in 1988 managed to blame government regulations for housing shortages and homelessness. Yet, as Smith says, "It was the outmigration of capital-by banks, landlords, homeowners and other lenders-that led to neighborhood decline in the first place."

Hang in there-the economy will improve. In the meantime, some of us will just have to grit our teeth and bear it.

"Our economic problems are stubborn, but not as stubborn as they often seem," columnist Robert J. Samuelson advised Newsweek's readership. "Some have solutions, and some solve themselves. We can reduce inflation. Although the cure (a recession) is painful, it works and the pain isn't permanent." Someone like Samuelson, who began working as an economics reporter for the Washington Post in 1969, might find it easy to conclude that unemployment for others is a "cure" that "works." But millions of people, with their lives badly harmed by joblessness, might be surprised to hear that "the pain isn't permanent."

Evidently, the wealthier one is, the easier it is to find silver linings. In mid-1989, the editor-in-chief of the Hearst Newspapers, William Randolph Hearst Jr., wrote in his weekly column that "the prophets of doom and gloom never seem to tire of underestimating the basic economic strength of this great country of ours." The son of Citizen Hearst cited recent financial news he deemed favorable, and then added: "All this is gratifying to me because I have been consistently optimistic about our economy." If you were so rich you might be consistently optimistic about our economy too.

On the whole, big business deserves public trust.

Most Americans don't seem happy with the extent of corporate power. A 1989 Harris Poll found that 69 percent of people in the U.S. agreed that business had "too much power over too many aspects of American life."

Public opinion would be even more lopsided if mass media bothered to provide anything approaching balanced reporting of economic issues. "They just don't bother to quote, much less feature, critics of business," says Doug Henwood of the Left Business Observer. Instead, the array of widely-publicized opinion is so narrow that congressional leaders from the Democratic Party are the only "opponents" of big business regularly presented.

Takeover experts are admirable financial wizards.

Much coverage of corporate takeover efforts is couched in terms of chivalry and knavery, with knights of the boardroom table squaring off in legendary battle.

"Nebraska investor Warren Buffett has come calling on the takeover battle-weary Gillette Co., playing the role of squire to the twice-targeted razor company,'' Associated Press reported. Going on to say that "analysts hailed the move," AP quoted an investment firm broker-"It's a masterstroke." As in the case of Buffett, many financiers highly-regarded in august investment circles get high marks from the press.

As for wheeler-dealers who wind up indicted, like Drexel Burnham Lambert junk bond whiz Michael Milken, they come across as bad apples in a fairly honest barrel. (As the Washington Post editorialized about the stock exchanges, "keeping the game clean is desperately important.") The direct victims of the vilified inside-traders of the late 1980s were other rich people-and hell hath no media fury like an elite stung.

"The Drexelites are a vulgar and greedy lot," commented Henwood, "but their crimes are nothing compared to the crimes committed by respectable bankers when they cash an interest check from a Third World debtor. They have blood on their hands." And left off the lists of parties aggrieved by the indicted are "workers and communities wrecked by the leveraging madness, and the economy at large, where risk of a deflationary debt-collapse has been greatly magnified."

Social Security is an economic drain.

In 1983, the media joined politicians in labeling a bill to cut back Social Security a "rescue move." But the resulting law-freezing the cost-of-living adjustment for six months, while raising payroll taxes and setting the retirement eligibility at age 67 instead of 65-was fiscally unnecessary. Former New York Times reporter John L. Hess contends that foes of Social Security have scored "wide success among reporters, but virtually none among voters." As the main pension program for Americans, Social Security "is beyond doubt the most popular government program." Yet this self-financed system gets lots of media flak.

A favorite line of attack has been the notion that rich retirees are milking Social Security. Yet without it, census data show, nearly half of elderly Americans would be below the poverty line. And, not counting Social Security, households with members 65 and older had a median income of $7,005 in 1986. Fully two-thirds of the nation's elderly recipients depend on Social Security for most of their income. However, journalists can be heard complaining that within a couple of years after retirement, beneficiaries have received more than they paid into Social Security; when Capitol Hill reporter Cokie Roberts made the complaint on ABC's This Week With David Brinkley, none of the assembled media sages differed with her. "This ignores the employers' matching share and 50 years or so of inflation and interest on the money paid in," says Hess. "Above all, it ignores that Social Security is an insurance program."

Social Security also gets blamed for contributing to the federal deficit. A 1988 column by Times economics expert Leonard Silk said that one of the prime causes of the deficit was "entitlement programs such as Social Security." But Hess points out that Social Security "has never cost the

Treasury a cent. In fact, it is a source of cheap credit to the Treasury, which acts as its banker..." Media do more to cover up than cover the implications of attacks on Social Security. As Hess observes, "to reduce the budget deficit by capping Social Security pensions should be understood as an effort to transfer the tax burden, still more, from the upper to the middle and lower brackets."

"The deficit" is preventing government from solving serious problems.

Under the headline "As World Changes, U.S. Leaders Paralyzed," the Washington Post published two front-page articles about the intractable federal budget deficit as autumn 1989 began. The stories barely mentioned the option of raising taxes for the rich, even though annual incomes of over $200,000 were being taxed at a mere 28 percent rate. And the stories skimmed over the government department with the highest bill-the Pentagon. Post reporter David Hoffman explained that "Bush has resisted any further cuts in defense spending because of uncertainty over the future of the Soviet Union's internal reform efforts and its foreign policy." Hoffman didn't mention that pressure from military contractors might also be a factor. By solemnly regurgitating the official rationale as if it were his own, he certainly was not jeopardizing his good relations with White House sources.

For all the clucking and moaning about federal budget woes, it was not quite a hot topic on the Tube, as Washington Monthly magazine enumerated in an article about Ted Koppel and ABC's Nightline: "While the administration and Congress added $ 1.6 trillion to our children's IOUs, Koppel devoted exactly six shows out of 1,850 to the topic [of the national debt]... During the same period, the World According to Nightline included eight shows on strange animals and another eight on either fatness or hair loss. It offered nine on Elvis, rock 'n' roll and video."

KEEPING LABOR IN ITS PLACE

As a reporter covering labor for the Washington Post, Peter Perl gained admittance to a $325-a-day seminar on how to bust up unions. He was surprised to find that out of 30 participants, four were vice presidents or managers of the newspaper he worked for. The founder of the firm running the anti-union seminars told Perl that the Post was "a leader in this field."

What Washington Post bosses did to press operators, breaking their union in 1975, served as a model for media owners. Fifteen years later, unionized Post employees including hundreds of reporters were acutely aware that the newspaper's management continued to get its way at the bargaining table. The Post hierarchy showed no sign of backing away from active hostility toward unionism in its own news and advertising departments, where conditions for clerical workers remained bleak. "Most of the labor issues I wrote about of employers abusing employees can be found in [the Post] building in the commercial departments," said Perl. "Workers here are computer monitored, their lives are harassed by supervisors, they're unfairly discharged, and they are victims of punitive absentee policies."

And while the Post waxes on about the importance of free speech, independent journalist David Moberg discovered, "The fear that being pro-union hurts one's career has a chilling effect on Post workers. There are many cases of lower-level employees who claim they were squeezed out of jobs for joining a union demonstration, being quoted by another newspaper criticizing the Post, or signing a union lawsuit."

Eager to tame the power of unions they face in negotiations, most media owners are hardly enthusiastic about labor power as a general concept. In its September 1989 editorial endorsing Mayor Ed Koch for reelection, the New York Times specified its priorities. It was, said the great gray newspaper, a "tormenting" choice between Koch and David Dinkins, who "has the temperament to soothe the city." On the other hand, Koch had something even better-demonstrated hostility to unions: "Mr. Koch, while provocative, has proved his ability to run the city, facing up to truculent special interests." And who were they? "The city is still paying for unreasonably generous labor settlements that City Hall negotiated with municipal unions in the 60's," the editorial went on. Fortunately, Koch "restored stability to the city after the fiscal crisis and imposed discipline on city services and unions... His record shows he can hold the line on labor contracts..."

Most of the nation's editorial writers are of a similar bent on the need to "hold the line on labor contracts." A Los Angeles Times survey found that in business-labor disputes, 54 percent of newspaper editors said they generally took business' side while only seven percent sided with labor.

Labor on the decline

Concerned with labor costs, big media owners are hardly unhappy about 5 the decline of union strength in the United States. By the end of the 1980s only 17 percent of American workers were union members-down from 40 percent in 1956. But "the decline of labor went largely unnoticed, particularly in the media," says Washington Post reporter Thomas Byrne Edsall. "As the power of organized labor in the United States fell, the interest of the press shifted elsewhere. In a direct reflection of the importance attached to the trade union movement, the assignment to cover labor-the labor beat-on many newspapers, which had been a high-status assignment in the heyday of labor's prestige...has been relegated to much lower status, and in many cases has been eliminated altogether."

In the society at large, Brooklyn's Auxiliary Bishop Joseph Sullivan stated in 1989, "Workers are measurably worse off than they were ten years ago."

Such a blunt declaration is far from common in mass media. "We don't get much coverage of basic conditions that working people are living with," says Laura McClure, a journalist specializing in labor issues. "Nowadays you have to have two wage earners to support a family in most cases. Cost of living allowances are usually no longer part of people's package deal from their employer, so wages are just continually dropping in value. Even though the majority of Americans are facing that situation, it's not something that you can pick up the New York Times and read about. In general it seems like the mainstream media try to present this as a period of prosperity."

It's no coincidence that prosperous people are usually the ones who provide "expert" commentary on TV news programs. The results can be ludicrous. "I get so annoyed," Barbara Ehrenreich remarked, "if I turn on one of the public affairs talk shows on TV and see usually four white men, well-dressed-I'm sure they earn close to six figures a year-pontificating on...the minimum wage. Now, none of them have been close to the minimum wage since they were paper boys. Why don't they have someone on who's trying to support a family on the minimum wage?"

As for joblessness, news reports routinely understate it. Not counted in the most publicized index of unemployment are "discouraged workers"-people who've given up on finding work-as well as part-time employees seeking full-time jobs. The Labor Department compiles quarterly totals that include such people. But, as we noted in Chapter Three, media concentrate on the lower "unemployment rate" announced by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

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Treating foreign labor better than our own

The U.S. media have cheered on workers organizing in Communist countries, while turning a blind eye to the suppression of labor inside our own borders. In 1981-the same year that martial law clamped down on the fledgling Solidarity union in Poland-President Reagan fired more than 11,000 striking air-traffic controllers and crushed their union. Our media condemned the repression of labor in Poland, but didn't raise strong objections when leaders of the Professional Air Traffic Controllers Organization went to jail in chains.

Near the end of the decade, when coal miners went on strike in the Soviet Union, the New York Times reported that their work stoppage resulted in "widespread, generally sympathetic coverage of the strike by Soviet newspapers and television." Yet at the same time, here at home, U.S. mine workers were in the fourth month of a strike that had already caused them and their families to endure more than 2,500 arrests. (Media accounts routinely referred to the arrestees as men striking the mines; in fact, many were women.) The arrests resulted from their nonviolent civil disobedience, blocking company trucks. The United Mine Workers of America and its officials had been hit with fines of $4 million. The struggle was to save unionism in the coal fields, where the Pittston Coal Group was cutting health-care and retirement benefits-and where, in contrast to the past, most coal was being mined nonunion.

The Soviet coal strike [1980s] was front-page news in the United States. The American coal strike wasn't. As columnist Alexander Cockburn observed in The Nation, media accounts of the U.S. strike "covered the 'violence' of the miners (rock throwing, destruction of property) without examining the economic and physical violence that is waged against the miners: no coverage of the danger of going down into the pits, where many miners die; of the conditions of poverty in which many of them live." When the National Labor Relations Board, hardly pro-union, finally declared that coal company owners had failed "to bargain collectively and in good faith," it was a dud of a story as far as media managers were concerned. "The major papers," Cockburn found, "said barely a word." On the main TV networks, the nightly newscasts devoted 36 minutes to the Soviet miners in eight days-twice the coverage of the U.S. miners' strike over a four-month period.

Doing interviews in Appalachia at the time, Laura McClure talked with miners and union supporters who were "absolutely livid" at the double standard. "They'd say, 'How come the papers are full of news about these Soviet miners? We support them-but what about us? The media defends people elsewhere but thinks it's OK to trample on the rights of workers here.' That was a really infuriating thing for a lot of people."

A grievous omission was the non-coverage of a remarkable event: For the first time in half a century [1989], according to union observers, strikers occupied a U.S. industrial plant, ejecting scabs and halting production. The nonviolent occupation lasted four days, with 99 miners holed up inside the Pittston Company's coal-processing plant near Carbo, Virginia, while about 1,000 union supporters blocked the plant gates. The occupation went virtually unreported in American mass media.

There was some good coverage of the 1989 miners' strike against Pittston. I n mid-June, on NPR, All Things Considered delved deeply into the conflict; the result was an excellent series of reports. But such exceptions contrasted with the dreary normalcy of cliché-ridden journalism looking askance at the miners' actions. It seemed difficult for the press to fathom modern-day labor militancy in the United States.

Corporate media's passion for union-busting

During the first year of the Bush presidency, mass media hardly objected when the U.S. government allowed tycoon Frank Lorenzo to use bankruptcy laws to bust unions at Continental Airlines. Nor did media cause a fuss when Bush departed from past presidential practice and refused to set legal mechanisms in motion for a cooling-off period requested by Eastern Airlines strikers. Although Lorenzo had alienated virtually his entire work force at Eastern, he retained loyal followers among mass media owners. When Lorenzo put out full-page ads attacking the Machinists Union, he didn't have to write much ad copy; he simply reprinted chunks of editorials from leading dailies-including "Labor Threatens the President," from the New York Times, which warned about the "cost of appeasing" labor. In four subsequent editorials, the Times accused labor of "threatening" President Bush, vital transport links, airline travelers and other carriers.

In the media picture, some strikers can quickly become invisible. The Eastern strike involved machinists, pilots and flight attendants. But news reports quickly zoomed in on the high-paid professionals, especially the pilots. "It's true they had more power than any of the other workers to make the company suffer," McClure recalled, "but there are more flight attendants than there are pilots, and flight attendants' starting salaries were like $12,000 a year, and their working conditions are terrible. Sometimes the media didn't even mention the fact that the flight attendants were on strike. It makes them feel like non-entities. They're out there on strike just like everybody else, and why don't they see themselves in the news media?"

Commonly enthusiastic about "cooperative" union approaches, the news media offer plenty of thinly-veiled advice about how unions must learn to be "mature" while avoiding confrontation. Typical was a lengthy New York Times article that appeared on the day when the one-million-member United Auto Workers union opened its triennial convention. "To cooperate with management or to confront?" asked the lead by reporter Doron P. Levin. The Times' preference was clear. The 24-paragraph article included only a single paragraph quoting a union "dissident"-even though the dissidents' challenge to the mainline leadership was the primary focus of the story. Those dissidents, the article explained, "pose a significant roadblock to the expansion of joint programs, a process that many experts say has enhanced the auto industry's competitiveness."

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Crisis in education

Whether reciting ills in the countryside or cities, the mass media do little more than note the continuing indices of social disaster. At decade's end, for example, the entire federal Education Department budget for a year, $22 billion, was not close to one-tenth of Pentagon outlays-although just about every news medium or politician has mouthed platitudes about the crucial importance of education for the future of America.

Children, we hear, are our most precious resources. And most of us seem to believe it. One 1989 poll found that two-thirds of the public "favored increasing spending on public schools, and nine in ten of that group said they would accept higher taxes to pay for it. Even adults without children in school backed greater spending by nearly two-to-one." Yet when President Bush balked at spending more federal funds for education, the press dutifully touted presidential verbiage as a meaningful substitute.

Media rarely have probed the human dimensions of spending priorities perpetuated by a man who'd promised to be the Education President. "Efforts begun more than ten years ago to equalize school funding between districts have been put on the back burner," Jonathan Kozol pointed out in 1989, "and are now replaced by strident exhortations to the poor to summon 'higher motivation' and, no matter how debilitated by disease or hunger, to 'stand tall.' Celebrities are hired to sell children on the wisdom of not dropping out of school. The White House tells them they should 'just say no' to the temptations of the streets."

While millions of teens leave high schools with needs unmet and often without diplomas, the media seem drawn more to mirages than remedies. TV networks and newsweeklies glorified New Jersey principal Joe Clark when he patrolled halls with a baseball bat in one hand and bullhorn in the other, as if kicking students out of schools might amount to a solution. Rather than focus on the lack of resources provided for education, the media are inclined to blame the victims, echoing widespread frustrations of a society beset with deep problems that afflict vulnerable young people.

Fair game for big corporations, children across the country may increasingly be subjected to commercially-sponsored national video broadcasts as part of their school days. Controversial plans by Whittle Communications (a division of Time Warner), aiming to sell ads on broadcasts fed directly into classrooms as part of curricula, set off some criticism. Whether in school or not, children are buffeted by the power of money.

Volunteers of America

In the late 1980s, U.S. officials escalated hype about voluntarism. A variety of private do-gooders were to rush where the government was unwilling to tread. A year after Bush won the presidency, the Christian Science Monitor published a news article headlined "A Thousand Points of Light to Shine." Shucking all sobriety at the outset, the lead declared: "President Bush's goal of promoting a 'thousand points of light' is beginning to shine." The reporter gushed that the approach "will heavily involve U.S. business, since the White House will be asking every commercial establishment to join voluntarily in efforts to find solutions for such problems as illiteracy, dropouts, drug abuse, unwed teen pregnancy, youth delinquency and suicide, AIDS, homelessness, hunger, unemployment, and loneliness."

In a nation ablaze with grave crises, the White House was piously urging citizens to fill their squirt guns and go after the infernos. The news media were willing conscripts in the chief executive's propaganda army. As the Monitor reported, "the President's program will rely heavily on the cooperation of the media. It calls for every television and radio station, cable system, newspaper, magazine, and other media institution to promote community service 'relentlessly' as a national ethic, spotlighting successful service initiatives, profiling outstanding community leaders and institutions, and informing the public of how to get involved in community service."

The scheme was off to a good start, the newspaper went on. "Already each of the three television networks has agreed to weave the theme of community service as a way to tackle social problems into the plots of some of their top-rated shows during three weeks in December. The combined audience of these shows is 290 million people." (Apparently some super-patriotic couch potatoes could be relied upon to watch more than once.) Such an approach, while no doubt involving many sincere people, was calculated to let the country's fat-cats and their government allies off the hook.

The voluntary nature of the whole setup guaranteed that the powerless and unfortunate would remain so-at the mercy of beneficence-subject to the ebb and flow of charity resources, shifting interests and the restless media spotlight that could popularize "community service" one season and desert it the next. Even as media blathered about the "thousand points of light" in action, on the eve of Thanksgiving 1989, a nationwide network of food banks reported a substantial drop in donations to feed the hungry. Corporations, perhaps due to effects of mergers and leveraged buyouts, had cut back on contributions of food for the needy-while federal program reductions had accounted for a drop of 75 million meals for the poor.

All in all, the thousand points of light would be no match for the nation's millions of points of blight. But the twinkling rhetoric would distract from demands for substantive government action. Media owners and their corporate colleagues had good reasons to prefer volunteer scenarios, popular among the well-off since the days when tycoons like John D. Rockefeller-got their pictures taken while giving shiny new dimes to little children. In the words of Stephen M. Wolf, the CEO of United Airlines, "in corporate America, economic reality often limits generosity. However, there is another option whose power to get things done is enormous-voluntarism... With each individual personally committed to doing something more than simply going about the business of the day, there is no limit to what can be accomplished."

Such words may seem benign, but they are much to do about doing next-to-nothing-fiddling with rhetoric while social problems burn. Mass media owners join in extolling altruism-in forms that will not threaten company profits. Voluntarism may suit them just fine. But as a potential solution it is, in essence, a hoax. "The much publicized volunteer literacy movement promoted for the last six years by Barbara Bush serves only 200,000 of the nation's estimated 30 million functional illiterates," says Kozol, who adds that "hope cannot be marketed as easily as blue jeans. Certain realities-race and class and caste-are there and they remain."

Savings and Loan boondoggle

Media failures had high financial costs for American society during the late 1980s. For years the warning signals were profuse that a bipartisan phalanx of officials in Washington were colluding with wealthy financiers to loot the national system of Savings and Loans. But the banking industry as a whole got little media scrutiny. In Texas, several years before the collapse of many of the state's financial institutions, a brief exception led to swift enforcement of the rule. Shortly after the Dallas Morning News disclosed the dire straits of a floundering bank, the newspaper's management fired the reporter who wrote the article, Earl Golz, and forced the resignation of the editor who okayed it. But blaming the journalists for the bad news did not prevent the bank from failing within two weeks. Afterwards, neither journalist was rehired.

Finally roused when the S&L ship foundered, a drowsy media establishment then featured expert commentary from many of the same quarters that had allowed the debacle to occur in the first place. "The background to the S&L scandal is rarely mentioned in media accounts, which rely on pro-deregulation mainstream economists, government officials and self-serving industry reps as sources," says Patrick Bond, economics correspondent for noncommercial Pacifica Radio News.

In early winter of 1989, a two-month study of network news detected the extent of the bias. "Of 80 on-air sources asked by the three nightly news broadcasts for their views on S&Ls between mid-December and mid-February, three-fourths were government officials and one-fourth were financial industry spokespersons or private analysts," Bond reported. "No public interest spokespersons were given an opportunity to comment on the problem."

The S&L crisis festered in an atmosphere encouraging financial speculation while calling for less federal regulation. Journalists belatedly blamed the Reagan administration-but many had been promoting a see-no-evil approach as late as Reagan's last year in office. Major newspapers were so supportive of bank deregulation proposals in 1988 that an official of the American Bankers Association claimed that out of editorials in 150 newspapers on the subject, all but ten were in favor of deregulation. "Letting [banks] diversify into additional kinds of businesses will improve stability," the Washington Post editorialized. "Banks need expanded powers to compete fairly in a vastly changed financial landscape," opined the Baltimore Evening Sun. And the Boston Herald was indignant: "No other country on earth strangles its banks with so many restrictions and prohibitions."

Once the Savings and Loan disaster became unmistakable, media singled out federal administrators, politicians and financial speculators as culprits. Rather than probing deeper implications of such extensive corporate clout in government agencies, the press was much more inclined to villainize specific officials, with some explicit victim-blaming tossed in for good measure. Newsweek economics columnist Jane Bryant Quinn wrote that the American public "is not so innocent. During the 1980s, we've happily fattened our savings accounts on the high rates of interest paid by insolvent S&Ls... Now we're being asked to give some of those unearned profits back. Rough justice, I'd say." In essence, Quinn was blaming average citizens-for keeping money in savings accounts!

Despite the magnitude of the rip-off, media avoided raising fundamental questions. "In general," Bond noted, "populist or anti-corporate perspectives were submerged beneath a chorus of 'expert' analysis which begins and ends with two crucial assumptions: 1) the taxpayers are going to foot the bill; and 2) the problem can be isolated and solved merely by throwing money around and tinkering with the regulatory apparatus."

In summer 1989, as Congress and the White House approved a "bailout" committing the government to spend at least $164 billion during the next decade to assist a thrift industry on the rocks, the press again proved much more interested in cheerleading than whistleblowing. A New York Times editorial praised "a promising plan to rid the industry of its rot and set surviving S&L's on a sounder path." The Washington Post hailed "an impressive achievement. It provides substantial assurance that this immensely expensive assault on the U.S. Treasury won't be repeated." Such plaudits kept ignoring what the mass media had been failing to highlight all year: There were alternatives to the pro-rich bias of the prevailing bailout scenario.

Instead of sticking average taxpayers with long-term costs including massive bills on interest, a quick step-up of tax rates for the wealthy and corporations could have raised $50 billion in three years, thus avoiding long-term debt. But, in the offices of journalists and politicians, a near-consensus throttled debate. ABC, CBS and NBC evening news programs, the New York Times and the Washington Post all refused to say a word about a "Report to U.S. Taxpayers on the Savings and Loan Crisis" released by Ralph Nader-who contended that the S&L bailout should be financed by economic strata benefiting from high-finance speculation, not by poor and middle-class taxpayers uninvolved in such high-roller maneuvers. The Wall Street Journal managed nine paragraphs on the Nader plan; MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour aired a sound bite that lasted 15 seconds. A parallel attack on the S&L bailout by the "Financial Democracy Campaign"-a coalition of over 100 consumer, housing, community and women's organizations-netted little more than brief wire service stories.

With the bailout iced, National Public Radio was explaining that the legislation would "rescue hundreds of ailing thrifts." An NPR reporter extended the medical metaphor so popular in media coverage of the S&L bailout: "As the bill that legislators hope will be the cure for the Savings and Loan crisis moves to the floors of both houses of Congress, the patient remains bruised and battered. Hundreds of Savings and Loans have already died. Hundreds more are on the verge, waiting for emergency help..." In response to the mission of mercy, bargain-hungry investors licked their lips, and promptly began wolfing down S&Ls at cut-rate prices-a story that media did little to illuminate.

Unreliable Sources

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