Seminar Paper Draft

Anna Coyle

Dr. Anne Wysocki

ENGL 742: Media Culture

Seminar Paper DRAFT

17 April 2011

Something Something Labor, Rhetoric, and Media (Need Wit!)

On February 11^th, 2011, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker declared his intentions to introduce emergency legislation to fill a gap in funding in the state budget. The proposed law, as originally written, required Wisconsin public employees to pay more for their health care and pensions while also decertifying and essentially removing collective bargaining rights from public employees. While the reality of the so-called “budget crisis” has been called into question, the proposed law, which in its most recent form still removes collective bargaining rights, passed the legislature and was signed by the governor. What concerns this essay, however, is not the destruction of human rights in the United States or even the legality of the law’s passage. What concerns this essay is what happened between the February 11^th announcement of the proposed legislation and the passage of the bill on March 10^th. After tens of thousands of students, workers, and citizens took over the Capital Building, one of the primary concerns for union organizers was news coverage outside the state of Wisconsin. Several criticisms were leveled against the bias of national news organizations, most of whom either did not cover the story or covered the story by adding an institutional bias.

Media, when used as tools for dissemination of content, are shaped by the institutions or individuals that own them. In his chapter “Mass Media” in the book Critical Terms for Media Studies, John Durham Peters states “Typically mass media are the playthings of institutions. They are expensive to run, usually require distinct castes with specialized knowledge (scribes, programmers, ‘talent’) to operate them, and are of great strategic importance politically, economically, culturally, or otherwise” (277). The institutions that have the financial ability to run and attract specialized knowledge to operate them – in the case of the American media, these are major corporations – have access to a strategically multi-faceted media that can influence political, economic, and the cultures within which they operate. Peters continues: “Rarely in history have mass media operated apart from the central power sources of a social order, and they are typically under the management of the palace, the market, or the temple. Where mass media are, there is usually power”, power to represent content in a particular way through the media they control (Peters 277).

In this essay, I will explore how the conglomeration of the American broadcast media, in particular television news media, has influenced the coverage of the Wisconsin union protests. Next, I will discuss how the potential use of digital media, in particular social media, can serve not only for the dissemination of news specific to a particular cause, but also for actual union organizing and activism. (And if I have the space, which I probably won’t, I’d like to address the issue of net neutrality. Actually, I probably won’t have time to even get there, but I’d like to use this as an argument for net neutrality.)

As I am discussing the bias of broadcast media organizations, I feel it necessary to acknowledge my own bias in the example I provide. As a union organizer and public employee in the state of Wisconsin, I helped organize the protests at the Capitol Building and participated in the three-week-long occupation of the building and grounds. I continue to participate in protests and actions supporting a pro-union cause. I acknowledge my bias because I cannot pretend that my experiences do not drive my passion to write on this subject or my analysis of the event and its news coverage. However, I do feel my experiences give me insight into the direct implications of the events and media coverage and media-prepared content of that coverage in comparison.

Before continuing, it is necessary to delve into how the conglomeration of power both is structured and how it works. Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman’s Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, originally published in 1988, explores the focusing of power as the owners of broadcast media repeatedly consolidate and merge, leaving the American broadcast media dominated by a hegemony of nine, and later five, major corporations. Chomsky and Herman explain that the American broadcast media form what they call a “propaganda model”. This model is described as “an analytical framework that attempts to explain the performance of the U.S. media in terms of the basic institutional structures and relationships within which they operate. It is our view that, among their other functions, the media serve, and propagandize on behalf of, the powerful societal interests that control and finance them” (Chomsky and Herman xi). The nine major corporations that control and finance broadcast media at the time of publication of Manufacturing Consent’s second edition are Viacom, Disney, General Electric, AOL Time Warner (now just Time Warner again), News Corporation, Bertelsmann, Sony, AT&T, and Vivendi. These corporations have further condensed, leaving Disney, News Corp, Time Warner, Viacom, and CBS as the largest media corporations in 2010.

Chomsky and Herman claim that “Media centralization and the reduction in the resources devoted to journalism have made the media more dependent than ever on the primary definers who both make the news and subsidize the media by providing accessible and cheap copy” (xvii). Basically, the news the public receives is restricted by the interests of those who control the medium through ownership, power that is concentrated as the media outlets continue to merge. These corporations then define and make the news. And ultimately, these issues open the content of the media open to infection of hegemonic bias. Chomsky and Herman continue:

The representatives of these interests have important agendas and principles they want to advance, and they are well positioned to shape and constrain media policy. This is normally not accomplished by crude intervention, but by the selection of right-thinking personnel and by the editors’ and working journalists’ internalization of priorities and definitions of news-worthiness that conform to the institution’s policy. (xi)

The news-worthiness of potential content, then, is sifted through the ideological bias of the controlling organization. Thus the media can never, as long as driven by concerns based on market and economics, remain neutral. Issues that the public may care about are pushed aside as the concerns of the media interrupt the coverage of important events. The public would an explanation as to why they are “working harder with stagnant or declining incomes, have inadequate medical care at high costs, and what is being done in their name all over the world. If they are not getting much information on these topics, the propaganda model can explain why: the sovereigns who control the media choose not to offer such material” (Chomsky and Herman xix). The material I believe the “sovereigns who control media” chose not to offer in the case of my experience is the perspective of the unions and their members, in particular the concerns of the protests.

Paul Krugman, an economics professor who also writes op-ed pieces for The New York Times, called the mainstream broadcast media’s surprising lack of coverage “a virtual blackout on the huge demonstrations in Wisconsin, except on Fox, which portrays them as thuggish and violent”. Alternative news sources, primarily on the Internet or Comedy Central, covered the news of the Madison protests while questioning the message of Fox News and the near-complete blind spot on other networks. The Huffington Post, a privately owned, notoriously liberal online news source and Internet start-up, covered the controversial coverage of The New York Times. (Incidentally, the Huffington Post has just been acquired by AOL.) (Insert more here)

I can attest to the sense among union organizers that the mainstream media was ignoring the protest. Estimates of protesters range from some hundreds on the first day of the occupation, February 14, to a high of 100,000 on March 13^th (Richmond). While the news that the Capitol Building was being occupied by students and union workers made national news, it quickly faded into the newscape as the national news began to focus on the plight of Middle Eastern attempts to rebel against oppressive regimes.

…

Peters explains “Raw technology is probably less important than the ways it gets implemented and configured” (276). The media itself is neutral, but its use is not. It is, instead, influenced by the ideology of the creators and thus the organization that funds the production. Labor issues in particular are in opposition with the function of the broadcast media. Continuing with this claim, Peters states “The fact that mass communication has typically been studied in terms of few speaking to many (as with radio and TV) rather than many speaking to few (as in strikes, petitions, boycotts, protests) shows an ideological bias toward standing power: indeed there are many forms of mass communication in which senders, and not just receivers, are large collectives” (276). The labor movement itself, through the actions they undertake in their efforts to further their collective agendas, performs a sort of mass communication. But if their efforts are not broadcast through a media that provides regional or national coverage, their actions remain visible only to those who are directly affected by the actions, such as townspeople and other union members.

Because “Mass delivery has great diversity in time and space, scale and speed” the means of delivery depends on the media used to deliver the material (Peters 274). These “Means of delivery can unite audiences in time but scatter them in space (classical broadcasting, text-based diasporas); scatter them in time but unite them in space (the Internet, pilgrimage); unite them in both space and time (assembly); or scatter them in both space and time (writing and printing)” (Peters 274). In the case of the labor actions the means of delivery “unite [the audience] in both space and time” as an assembly. For the action to become publicized, including broadcast by the media, the action must appeal to the ideology of the corporation. If the action does, and it is publicized, it is scattered in space, reaching a larger audience.

How much of the audience receives the transmission is measured in different ways, depending on the media used to disseminate the news item. Broadcasting “ratings mechanisms have sought a statistical picture of audience behavior and size, with varying success. With Internet ‘cookies’, it is much easier to track what kind of engagements people have with remote environments, though the mystery of what happens at the other end of a sending still remains” (Peters 275).



(End of work so far) Woo-hoo. Below is the link to my essay draft.

Essay DRAFT Link