Mainstream Media Manipulation of Meaning

It happens every day, but Labor Day is a clear example. The corporate media and their hired employees make decisions about what issues are worthy of coverage and how they should be slanted. Some important issues and viewpoints are merely ignored and, therefore, remain invisible to most of the reading public that rely on television or newspapers for their knowledge of events in the world, the nation, and in our community. Local television is beneath contempt in its coverage of issues affecting working families, so let's look at the newspapers. Well, some of them, because, of course, there are no Labor Day editorials or news items in today's Benton County Daily Record.

Today's editorial in The Morning News is "Labor Day is losing its meaning." Whose fault is that? It might be the Stephens-owned Morning News, which borrowed the canned editorial from Scripps-Howard instead of bothering to write one of their own that brought home the meaning to local workers. For that view, you would have to read Lowell Grisham's guest column today in the Northwest Arkansas Times. Neither of these are available online as I write this.

Today's editorial in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette also makes my point. It tells us that while "Labor Day used to be a big deal," today it "has just become another day off." It then goes on to bash the organizations representing Arkansas teachers, asserts that "unions deserve the bad press they get from time to time," and quips that "reporters who have to work today (dang !) will doubtless be assigned to the nearest Local 888 for a feature story, and a chance to Explain The Meaning of the holiday." The reason that Labor Day has no real meaning anymore, the editor says, is because union workers should be thankful for what they have and say, “Whoa! A worker’s paradise! We’ve won!”

I doubt that even most working reporters would believe that, and I'm certain that the newspaper's workers who are exempt from coverage by the state minimum wage would not agree. Adam Wallworth's article in today's Northwest Arkansas Times also puts the lie to the Democrat-Gazette's editorial that came in the same appropriately-yellow plastic sack. Wallworth actually talks with the Northwest Arkansas Center for Worker Justice, an interfaith alliance, and notes the prevalence of wage theft--contractors who refuse to pay their workers--and instances of employers willfully failing to provide workers compensation coverage to workers injured on the job in Northwest Arkansas. That's some "workers' paradise."

Alternative views can be found on some local blogs. One local union blog is mostly platitudes with no realistic call to action, but at least it makes an effort to explain the meaning of Labor Day for workers. Better is Richard Drake's Street Jazz blog where he suggests that local media call it Associates Day, because "doing stories about working class issues might be a little awkward in a part of the country where news anchors genuflect as Wal-Mart press releases are treated like manna from Heaven. So instead we’ll have what we always have - hard-hitting stories about how folks amuse themselves on the Labor Day weekend." The same Arkansas Democrat-Gazette that touts a workers' paradise lets reporter Brandon Tubbs make this point in its news coverage.