Labor Makes the News: Newspapers, Journalism, and Organized Labor, 1933–1955

Abstract

Labor Makes the News examines newspaper coverage of organized labor during the burst of union activity that began in the early 1930s. For activists and sympathizers, it was an article of faith that newspapers were deliberately unfair. However, publishers and their employees responded to the labor movement with great diversity, in part because publishers recognized that many readers were union members. For reporters, covering labor tested the boundary between personal and political interests and the professional ideal of neutrality on news pages. While publicly condemning the press, labor officials used newspapers to establish their legitimacy and wage war against enemies. Examining the treatment of organized labor provides a window for viewing the interplay among the sociopolitical, economic, and occupational goals of the publisher, the editorial worker, and the labor leader.

We’ve Got a Union, Now What?

“…Evolving routines and labor practices, some of which brought new hierarchies into the newsroom, drove newsworkers to join the movement, albeit not en masse (Brasch, 1991;Kaul, 1986;Leab, 1970;Salcetti, 1995). Some publishers, recognizing that their papers' readers were often themselves union members, responded positively (Glende, 2012a). Yet, most benefited from reporters' continued resistance to the working-class label (Glende, 2012b).…”