Bob McChesney says that in the early 1940s, there w ere about a
thousand labor-beat reporters. T oday there are seven.
Every new spaper has a business section, w hich responds to the
interests of a small part of the population—the part that happens to
control the new spaper, oddly enough. But I’ve never seen a labor
section in a new spaper. W hen labor new s is run at all, it’s in the
business section, and is looked at from that point of view. T his
simply reflects, in a very transparent w ay, w ho’s in pow er.
Lots of people criticize the ongoing tabloidization of the new s. T he
program directors respond by saying, We’re giving the public what
it wants. No one’s forcing them to turn on the TV and watch our
programs. W hat do you think about that?
First of all, I don’t agree that that’s w hat the public w ants. To
take just one example, I think people in New York w ould have been
interested in learning that NAFTA w as expected to harm “w omen,
blacks and Hispanics [and] semi-skilled production w orkers” (70% of
all w orkers are categorized as “semi-skilled”) —as a very careful
reader of the Times could discover the day after Congress passed
NAFT A.
Even then, the facts w ere concealed in an upbeat story about the
likely w inners: “the region’s banking, telecommunications and
service firms, from management consultants and public relations to
law and marketing...banks and Wall Street securities firms,” the
capital-intensive chemical industry, publishing (including media
corporations), etc.
But that aside, w hat people w ant is in part socially created—it
depends on w hat sort of experiences they’ve had in their lives, and
w hat sort of opportunities. Change the structure and they’ll choose
different things.
I visited a w orking-class slum in Brazil w here people gather
during prime television time to w atch locally produced films on a
large outdoor screen. T hey prefer them to the soap operas and
other junk on commercial T V, but they can only have that
preference because they w ere offered the choice.
W hen people in the U S are surveyed, it turns out that w hat they