ARCHIVES: The U.S. Left and Media Politics

American democracy is in deep trouble. Cynicism and distrust of the political system, fueled at least in part by imposed ignorance, have grown steadily in recent years. There are several reasons for this, but few as important as the condition of our media. Many Americans, especially those on the left, know that after a generation of rampant consolidation and conglomeration, the American media are dominated by less than twenty firms—and that a half-dozen or so corporate giants hold the commanding positions. These firms use their market power to advance their own and other companies’ corporate agendas. And they increasingly commercialize every aspect of our culture. By any known theory of political democracy, this tightly-held media system, accountable only to Wall Street and Madison Avenue, is a poisonous proposition.

A healthy democracy depends on an informed and educated public, but the wealthy and powerful few who make the most important media decisions deny that as a possibility. Theirs is a system in which crucial political issues are barely mentioned, or are molded to fit the confines of their elite debate. The public is thus denied the tools it needs to participate as an informed citizenry. Moreover, the media system not only serves the ideological needs of our business-run society, but is itself a major sector of the economy.

[pullquote] The simple fact is that plutocracy and democracy are incompatible. You can’t have both, and to the extent that plutocracy wins, the people lose. [/pullquote]

One would expect to see an exploration of ways to fight back, among those who see the industry’s concentrated power and untrammeled commercialism as roadblocks in the path of democracy. Yet, for generations, the control and structure of the media industries have been decidedly off-limits as a subject of political debate on the left.

As long as this holds true, it is difficult to imagine any permanent qualitative change for the better in the American media system. Without reform of the industry, the prospects for the United States improving the quality of our democracy seem dim indeed. It is mandatory for the U.S. left to put media reform on its agenda.

Until after the Second World War, concern about media reform was less pressing, because labor and the left understood the importance of communicating with and educating their own members and supporters. Every labor union and political group had its own publications in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some of the more successful and aggressive unions and political parties had extensive media outlets. In the early 1900s, Socialist Party members and supporters published some 325 English and foreign language daily, weekly and monthly newspapers and magazines. Most of these were privately owned or were the publications of one or another of the 5,000 Socialist Party locals. They reached a total of more than two million subscribers.

Similarly, from the late nineteenth century on, just about every labor union had its own newspaper. In the mid-thirties, when the Congress of Industrial Organizations(CIO) was organized, it explained to its members that the labor movement could not thrive if the press remained the exclusive property of capital, and made the creation of labor and public service media a high priority. So did the more conservative American Federation of Labor’s central labor council in Chicago, which established a local radio station as a conscious first step in setting up a pro-working-class network. All of this was part of a broader effort during the period to establish a cultural popular front. It was overwhelmed by corporate opposition in the thirties, and was given the final blow with the start of the Cold War in the late forties.

In sum, labor and the left’s declining interest in developing its own independent media can be traced to post-war labor-corporate accommodation and the disruption and decline of the broader left as a result of Cold War anticommunism. The process was aided, too, by the change in corporate journalism in these years from a more open conservativism to a new, ostensibly non-partisan or “objective” professionalism, a change designed to broaden the appeal—and the advertising revenue—of newspapers, magazines, and, later, television.

Then, too, labor and the left, like their corporate opponents, came to see the media largely as a form of public relations. Thus, they fell victim to the belief that the media were not important, that the “real action” for social change lay in organizing and militant activity. Attracting media attention became more important than having a means of communication that might educate members and leaders of progressive organizations.

After taking a beating in the media for fifty years, however, organized labor has begun to show some interest in media reform. Labor leaders today are more aware of the huge barrier that the corporate media presents to labor’s advance. Yet this sentiment remains largely inchoate. At the 1997 AFL-CIO annual convention, perhaps the most political and vibrant meeting in the organization’s history, the issue of media was not even mentioned in passing. Under John Sweeney, the AFL-CIO’s initial foray into media activity has not gone beyond the half-baked idea of spending a small fortune on TV ads and hiring PR firms in an attempt to massage the press. In contrast, the United Auto Workers (UAW) recently invested heavily in the United Broadcasting Network, a 100-station radio operation that also publishes a bi-weekly newspaper. The UAW tried something similar in the 1940s, in a failed attempt to combat the antilabor bias of the commercial radio broadcasters of that era. Yet aside from this effort by the UAW, the structural barriers to a democratic or pro-labor media remain unchallenged by labor, at both the national and local levels.

When one sees how labor and progressive social movements have fared in the U.S. media over the past fifty years, the importance of media reform becomes less abstract. In the thirties and forties, nearly every daily newspaper with a medium-to-large circulation had at least one full-time labor editor or beat reporter. When the Flint sitdown strikes established the UAW as a major trade union in the late thirties, it was front-page news. True, the coverage was often unsympathetic, but at least the public knew what was happening. Now, in the nineties, fewer than ten labor reporters remain on daily newspapers in the entire nation. Conversely, there are seemingly thousands of business writers who, daily, fill the nation’s papers with their stories. Thus, in 1989, when the largest sitdown strike since Flint took place in Pittston, Virginia, it went virtually unreported. When several leading U.S. trade unions formed a new Labor political party in 1996, that, too, was unreported in the commercial media. Labor coverage has been reduced to stories about how strikers are threatening violence or creating a burden for the people in their communities. If one read only the commercial media, it would be difficult to determine what good was served by having labor unions at all. I do not mean to suggest that corporate media hostility to labor is swallowed hook, line, and sinker by the public. The 1997 Teamster strike against UPS elicited the usual right-wing hysteria about labor, but the remarkable public support for the strikers forced some of the media to deal more fairly with the Teamsters, despite the fact that the press was far from sympathetic to the union.

The political ignorance and confusion reigning in America are so pervasive and obdurate that the most extreme idiocies are entertained by tens of millions with hardly a challenge. Here, Obama, a cynical shill for Wall Street, is depicted as a communist on a rightwing poster. How stupid can you be?

Meanwhile, the idea of organizing for structural media reform is ignored or opposed by the entire democratic left in the United States. Two of the three new progressive party groups—the Labor Party and the New Party—avoid any mention of media in their core platforms. Some chapters of the Green Party have made an issue of media ownership and control, perhaps influenced by Ralph Nader’s persistent call for stricter control over the publicly owned airwaves, but these are token gestures at best. The Progressive caucus of the U.S. Congress has shown only slight interest in the matter, although Rep. Bernie Sanders (Ind., VT) recognizes that “This is an issue that is absolutely vital to democracy, and that only the left can address. The New Party, the Green Party, the Labor Party, as well as progressive Democrats, should be all over this issue,” he says, though he laments, “for most of the left, it’s not even on the agenda.” Sanders, the most successful American socialist politician in half a century, is unequivocal about the importance of media reform: “The challenge of our time is to make media relevant for a vibrant democracy.”

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert W. McChesney teaches communication and library science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. This piece was originally presented at the “Back to Basics” conference, sponsored by In These Times, held in Chicago in October 1998.