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6-08-07, 10:27 am
There is no free press locally, and by that I mean in the greater Seattle area which can be seen as stretching from Seattle to the East Bay, and southward to Tacoma. My definition of a free press is a newspaper that covers, and gives voice to, all the social and economic classes of people who live in the wider polis. Let us look at the two dailies, The Seattle Times and The Seattle Post-Intelligencer. I am not interested in the two weeklies, The Seattle Weekly and The Stranger, for though they refer to themselves as alternate newspapers, they merely ape the dailies, in that they get most of their revenue from advertising. And, as with the two dailies, neither of the weeklies cover labor at length or depth.
A press that excludes, for the most part, stories and reportage on labor and the working class, is hardly a free press. At least one half of the population is kept out of the news. Look at the format for both dailies: the front section is national news; second section is local news; third section is arts & entertainment; fourth section is sports, and the fifth section, capitalized here, is Business! And lastly there are the classifieds. The Sunday paper, a meld of both dailies, is so heavy with advertisements that you can bench-press it to stay in shape!
Occasionally news on labor and trade unions appears in the Business section or in the national news. But most of the copy in the Business section gives voice to, and butters up, the corporate world. Labor is almost invisible: the men and women who actually build and maintain the corporate office buildings, who maintain our streets and highways, who build our bridges, grow, process, butcher, catch, and distribute our food are seldom heard from or seen in the pages of our two daily newspapers.
When I asked one of the business editors of the two dailies, via email, why there was so little coverage of labor in the paper, and why the Business section was called the Business section, he replied that it was business that most readers were interested in. He did not say the obvious, that the corporate world provides most of the advertising revenue. (Check out the cost, for instance, for a full page mobile phone ad!)
One of the assumptions of the print media - and television is not worth talking about in terms of a free press - is that the working classes do not read and can not think. Therefore the likes of Bill Gates get a bully pulpit - and he is but one example – to push technology and see to it that as many young people go to university so that he can keep his cubicles on the Microsoft campus full of white collar drones. Little does the newspaper- reading-public know that in the present greater-Seattle economy – though this is not necessarily so across the entire United States – that a trade-union worker makes a better living, and has better health-care than most university graduates. Granted, this situation may not last forever, given global warming and the repercussions for all of us.
Another side-effect of the lack of labor coverage is that it helps the corporations to spread their mythology and propaganda practically free-of-charge. The corporate, and small-business, hostility to the minimum wage and to immigrant workers is but a blatant strategy to suppress wages and to help keep a pool of cheap labor.
The history of corporations vs. labor – always supported by the courts in favor of the corporations – is a subject I won't go into in this brief essay. I will close by saying what is obvious to me: without a truly free press, you do not have democracy. Do not!
- Bill Witherup is Director of the Gene Debs Labor Ensemble, Seattle. His essay "Mother Witherup's Top Secret Cherry Pie" is included in AMERICAN WORKING-CLASS LITERATURE:AN ANTHOLOGY, edited by Nicolas Coles and Janet Zandy. Oxford 2006
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