 The New York Times and the Writers' Strike: Part 2 - General Reflections | Jan. 22nd, 2008 @ 04:12 pm  |
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Part One of this post How Weird is The New York Times?: NYT Assigns Former Producer to Cover the WGA
In one respect the writers' strike is unusual for The New York Times; "the paper of record" has been printing frequent, if not substantive, articles on the strike and the strike leaders. If this were any other strike by a union of comparative size we would have been privileged to receive three or four reports on the course and consequences of the strike, no more. But this is a Hollywood and New York Strike, effecting the very industry that The New York Times is close to, so we are cursed with a surplus of riches. Instead of three or four generally pro-industry articles from The Times we get a dozen and more.
This strike is unusual for The Times in another way; it has a regular reporter assigned to the strike beat. Michael Cieply
is the reporter's name and he is an old hand at his job, who did a stint as a producer for Sony, which is of course one of the companies that is opposing the WGA. As noted earlier it treads close to an ethical line to assign a reporter to cover a strike who was once worked as a "producer" for one of the companies being struck. But more on Mr. Cieply later. I want to emphasize that this note is not about Michael Cieply or any other single reporter. He is only important here to the extent that he is the usual New York Times filter through which flows "all the news that is fit to print." He would not be in the position he has obtained if he were not able to articulate the usual anti-union world-view of the business leaders.The coverage by The Times of the writers' strike has followed the usual pattern of corporate media coverage of union politics. The major media rarely covers strikes or the labor movement without marginalizing the union leaders involved, and trying its best to isolate the strikers from the rest of society. The New York Times treats unions and their leaders with the same template that they treat third world countries and their leaders. Union leaders are presented as either incompetent, unrealistic, or criminals. These leaders may be radical or moderate or pragmatic depending on whether they are helping the business classes or pursuing an independent course. Strikers are made to fall into at least one of three categories. They are either; (1) too uneducated or limited in their view to realize their own best interests and therefore marching toward mirages when they strike; or (2) coddled and lazy workers looking to extend their undeserved privileges; or (3) violent thugs who only have themselves to blame when respectable society cracks down on them.
The New York Times is our preeminent liberal newspaper and they will not be caught out advocating iron-fisted union busting; such a stance wold alienate their liberal middle class readership. So given the above three categories the next move of Times strike coverage is to find inside the union the true voice of the rank and file. They will find or invent a clique of union members who represent the mature leaders and pragmatic union leaders, or the union leaders who are realistic about the need to rationalize an industry and throw off dead weight, or the union leaders who are responsible and law abiding.
Reduced to its essentials the coverage of strikes by The New York Times is not much different than the kind of coverage we receive from the Murdoch owned New York Post. If either deigns to cover a strike we mostly see the strike from the point of view of "the innocent bystander" (consumers, non-striking workers who have lost their jobs, the investor), the business leader, or the union dissident. The main difference between The Times and The Post is that The Times tries to articulate the views of that section of the business class that wants "labor peace" for the long run and the Post just says what it is for, straight out with-out grace notes or business facts. The Post will simply call strikers clowns, rats, or thugs where the Times will condescend in the kind of Times-speak it usually reserves when covering a Third World country and the "underclass." Thus there is a sense in Times' strike coverage that strikers are somehow like children -- they are out of their depth in the real world; they are crying over their loss of the warm spot; or they are acting out of misplace nostalgia for a time of union militancy and socialist dreams. Besides all that, strikers, unlike respectable businessmen, argue among themselves and are mired in dissension. Occasionally, the mask of middle-class liberalism drops and strikers are told to get in line or get crushed.
In the above the reader will find the usual contours of newspaper coverage of unions and strikes. So it must be understood that when I dissect the Times' treatment of the writers' strike I am not claiming that the WGA leadership or the writers on strike are being treated worse than other groups in the labor movement. They are being treated about the same. Any quirks in treatment mostly have to do with accidental circumstances and the fact that we are, after all, dealing with an industry of celebrities.
The latest examples of anti-union reporting of the writers' strike follow a familiar pattern with a few twists. The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Variety, and The Hollywood Reporter are the major papers to look at when considering the WGA strike. (As usual The Wall Street Journal is an exception that would have to be dealt with on its own. Its coverage has been bluntly and honestly anti-union but without the usual cliché assumptions.) All of them have taken the exact same line from the beginning of the strike. Stated simply their line is as follows: The leadership of the WGA is unrealistic. The WGA leaders are amateurs who have lost touch with reality. The WGA leaders have a personal "ideological agenda", that can only hurt the industry.*
What all of these newspapers harp on again and again is dissent within the WGA. They look for it everywhere and in every article. When one prominent writer decided to scab on the strike he was given full, and repeated coverage. (One would think that he was not an individual but an army.) There are rumors that "A-list" screenwriters have broken ranks with the WGA, but none are named and none have come forward. In short, all four newspapers have invented a dissident faction of the WGA that is ready to break into the open and bring the current leadership down..
Thus you get headlines such as the following:
Writers’ Strike Tests the Mettle of 2 Outsiders
By MICHAEL CIEPLY (Published January 19, 2008, The New York Times)In Writers Strike, Signs of Internal Discontent Over Tactics
By MICHAEL CIEPLY, (January 11, 2008, The New York Times)Directors' Deal Could Split Striking Writers
By Carl DiOrio (A Reuters piece, Published January 17, 2008, in The New York Times but also picked up by The Hollywood Reporter, The Washington Post, ABC.net, and a number of other newspapers. With the aid of google I looked around a bit and of the Reuters stories on the WGA picked up by other news venues this is the most popular.)What is the real news of this strike? It is the unusual unity so far of the writers. I have rarely seen a strike where the workers turn up at the picket line in high numbers three months after the strike has begun. Picket lines often dwindle to 5 or 10 people this long into a strike. At the most recent picket line I went to at Viacom near Times Square in New York City I heard lively political debate and economic analysis. I heard debate over strategy and there was high level of consciousness of what this strike is about. And there were more than 200 people on the picket line.
What is The New York Times and Cieply's explanation for all of this? Perhaps it is the "Woodstock atmosphere
" on the picket lines.In the 1980s, when I was part of the Central American solidarity movement the Times would dismiss every large protest as "reminiscent of the sixties." The idea was that "those people" who are concerned with the lives of people in distant lands were motivated by nostalgia and we should ignore them. Cieply uses similar rhetoric in his analysis of the WGA strikers. He uses (sometimes weird) variations of oft' repeated anti-union clichés. Some of these cliches I noted in a previous post where I stated, "If ... picket lines are old fashion sorts of affairs that people won't cross, they blame unions for being thugs. If picket lines largely act as a moral reminder that people should stick together for the good of all who work, then the picketers are called cry-babies or people who are not serious." In this Cieply simply echoes the propaganda of the AMPTP. Early on the conglomerate mouthpieces complained of the "alternating mix of personal attacks and picket line frivolity" referring to "the WGA's continuing series of concerts, rallies, mock exorcisms, pencil-drops and Star Trek-themed gatherings."
Such complaints are clichés that seasoned union veterans have come to expect from The New York Times -- strikers are petulant children, or misguided idealists, or ideologically motivated reds, or thuggish criminals.
* Footnote: The ideological agenda of the WGA leaders is never defined precisely, but the phrase is used to refer to the goal of the WGA leadership to organize the unorganized and to maintain union solidarity. If this is "an ideological agenda" then the whole idea of having a union, and believing in worker solidarity and collective action has to be considered "an ideological agenda." The phrase "ideological agenda," which The New York Times has repeated uncritically is a code phrase for "these guys are "reds". One should expect old fashion red-bating every now and then. But in this case it hides something far more sinister. The idea that "organizing the unorganized" among Hollywood writers is itself an ideological agenda should signal to all unions that the conglomerates no longer intend to let unions expand within the movie and media industries. If other Hollywood unions listen carefully they would hear a union busting agenda from the multinational corporations now running things in Hollywood.
Jerry Monaco
22 January 2008
New York City
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.amptp, anti-union, capitalism, ceos, cliches, dga, hypocrisy, ideology, media analysis, new york times, patric verrone, picket lines, strike breakers, strike tactics, strikes, wga, writers, writers' strike
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