Abstract
How did it come to pass that American unions changed from being the bedrock of the middle-class economy in the early forties to “job killers” today? The answer, according to Christopher R. Martin in No Longer Newsworthy: How the Mainstream Media Abandoned the Working Class, places American journalism—and the middle class with it—at the center of an eighty-year collapse. That the American economy changed from a union-based economy of worker-citizens to today’s service-based economy is not news. But Martin’s identification of the national press as a key site of that chute is. Martin is professor of Digital Journalism and Communication Studies at the University of Northern Iowa.
In this well-researched and equally well-written monograph, Martin finds evidence of the press’s abandonment of the working class in the texts of the daily news. Based on two deep content analyses of national outlets, he deftly identifies the early inclusion of labor in the news and its subsequent exclusion to demonstrate the long, downward trend he wants the reader to see. He anchors this history to coverage by the New York Times of a massive transit strike in that city in 1941. The news represented the workers as doing something normal.
Yet, in reviewing reports of transit strikes over the next four decades, he demonstrates that while previous strike coverage had made no mention of “inconveniences to the displaced rider,” by 1970, “[T]he transit consumer, to be pitied in despair and indulged in anger, became a significant actor in transit strike narratives.” Over time, as the entitled patron commands more attention in the news, the concurrent dimming of the modern worker signals the tipping point in this economic sea-change. This is a big claim but Martin registers a major scholarly insight here by showing how the national press slowly, but surely, recorded the decline of the tacit pact of comity between the news and citizen “workers” in favor of the individual “employee.”
How did this violation of journalistic values undo the social contract between citizens and the press? Martin cites the narrative power of the news, referring to James Carey’s notion that “news is not information, but drama.” Martin explains that “[T]hese dramas, existing in historical time, are crafted into news narratives that ‘have a particular structure or frame.’” In his analysis, he shows this effect through his rich account of how newspapers shifted from framing “workers” as “employees” to a new focus on “consumers” over unionized “producers.”
In this way, Martin makes the case that the news threw its middle-class readership under the bus in favor of a new class of “upscale” consumers who would define the newspapers’ new market and steer its editorial agenda. Instead of reporting the worker economy in ways that normalized it, the media embraced a new class of monied individuals whose stakes in the late twentieth century economy were increasingly detached from pensions and collective bargaining in favor of “personal finance.”
He dates the “boom in the literature of personal finance” to 1972 when Time, Inc., introduced Money magazine. Others joined quickly. In 1978, the Times introduced “Business Day,” its first ever section devoted to consumer-oriented business news. USA Today opened in 1982 with its daily “Money” section. Gone from the news pages was the tacit link to the collective economy of labor and the role of the middle class in it.
In the absence of a sustainable labor frame, Martin charges the national press with dereliction of duty by failing to verify the conservative claim that government regulations of all sorts were “job killers.” He explains that this frame overtook traditional debates between liberals and conservatives to produce “a figurative shape shifter for conservatives; anything could be deemed a job killer if Republicans didn’t like it.” The conceptual wedge that he drives here is key, because it serves to explain the media’s role in the current failure of the American political system where “facts” give way to nullifying “alternative realities.” As if to echo Lippmann’s statement in Liberty and the News that “the crisis of democracy is a crisis of journalism,” Martin correctly cites the media’s failure not only to challenge the Republican propaganda machine’s baseless repetition of the “job killer” frame—he cites Trump here in real time—but to check it against the nonstop repetition by conservative sources in the news that has come to replace the truth. For workers, labor, and the state of the nation, Martin shows that this failure of the press has been epic.
The risk of such an indictment of the media in critical studies like this one is that it would be totalizing, damning journalism for its faults. But Martin is too thoughtful for that. In a flurry of considerations and conclusions, he calls journalism back to solve the problem. He writes, “Mainstream journalism needs to rethink its conception of audience and to correct its error of a half-century ago in deciding to concentrate ‘on the upper half of the market’ and ignore ‘the less desirable customers.’” His faith unshaken by the winds of neoliberalism, the rise of political tribalism, and the fall of the media, he continues, “If journalism is essential to democracy, it should be part of the process: not just selecting a small, desirable audience but also making a public audience out of the entire community, nation, and/or state.” As a reader, I am available for such faith in what once worked.