Framed!

Christopher R. Martin argues that the mainstream news media (and the large corporations behind them) put the labor movement in a bad light even while avoiding the appearance of bias. Martin has found that the news media construct "common ground" narratives between labor and management positions by reporting on labor relations from a consumer perspective.Martin identifies five central storytelling frames using this consumer orientation that repeatedly emerged in the news media coverage of major labor stories in the 1990s: the 1991–94 shutdown of the General Motors Willow Run Assembly Plant in Ypsilanti, Michigan; the 1993 American Airlines flight attendant strike; the 1994–95 Major League Baseball strike, the 1997 United Parcel Service strike, and the 1999 protests against the World Trade Organization's conference in Seattle.In Martin's view, the news media's consumer "take" on the labor movement has the effect of submerging issues of citizenship, political activity, and class relations, and elevating issues of consumption and the myth of a class-free America. Instead of facilitating a public sphere, the democratic ideal in which the public can engage in discovery and rational-critical debate, Martin says, news organizations have fostered a consumer sphere, in which public discourse and action is defined in terms of consumer interests—the impact of strikes, lock-outs, shut-downs, and protests on the general consumer economy and the price, quality, and availability of things such as automobiles, airline flights, and baseball tickets.

As wages stagnate or decline while executive compensation rises, unions can make a stirring case that their members need a 'living wage' to become respectable consumers (aka readers and viewers).... The media is hardly management's enemy. But if company skirmishes become class warfare, it may become so., Christopher R. Martin lays bare the presumptions and preferences of an industry whose bottom line has become the bottom line., Compelling firsthand (and first-rate) accounts of strikes and protests opposing the skewed manner in which they were reported by the media... make for fascinating reportage. With appendices of specific media reports (and reporters), this thoroughly engaging sociopolitical commentary is worthy of Michael Moore and Al Franken, but devoid of their often glib facility, putting scholarship first., Framed! points out that news organizations place coverage of labor, like many other stories, in narrative frames that at the same time help to explain an issue and exclude alternative explanations., This volume joins the growing collection of carefully documented studies that demolish the myth of liberal media bias promulgated by the radical Right.... Martin carefully details the way in which the news media use negative framing in reporting stories about labor in general and organized labor in particular.

Christopher R. Martin is Associate Professor of Communications at Miami University. He is coauthor of Media and Culture: An Introduction to Mass Communication.