The United States needs “a working-class media” to “recover” control of the national conversation about income inequality, class and race and their intersection, social justice journalist Carla Murphy told organized labor communicators.
Murphy said that without such a working-class media—now nonexistent except for the People’s World of Chicago and a few other outlets—the corporate class and its mischaracterizations, or worse, of workers still would dominate the national discussion. And that discussion also excludes the linkage between class and race, she told the International Labor Communications Association biennial convention.
The demographics of the nation’s newspapers and TV networks—before everything broke up—did not reflect the nation’s population, she said. And they still don’t. Women and people of color are vastly underrepresented, and 80% of news media workers have college degrees, while only one-third of the population does.
As a result, the views and even the regular lives of women, people of color and other minorities get and got short shrift, if they’re covered at all, she noted.
That fosters massive distrust of the mainstream media in the uncovered communities, Murphy said. And that mistrust predates the collapse of the mainstream media with the advent of the internet and its takeover of the mainstream’s revenues. It also predates the rise of the right-wing media ecosystem.
“But the internet also democratizes the media,” Murphy noted, both by lowering barriers to individuals entering the news stream and by letting people force to the fore topics the mainstream media previously ignored. She gave as an example the “turning point” of the Occupy movement, precursor to “Fight for 15 and a Union.”
Both brought income inequality and the widening gap between the rich and the rest of us to the fore, Murphy noted. They’ve stayed there ever since. But even when the mainstream media covered those issues, its outlets did so from the perspective of their readers—especially the 1%—and corporate advertisers. That gave workers little space or attention, she noted.
That’s also where the labor press can come to the fore, Murphy said. It can do so not just in print and over the internet, but through social media, podcasts and other forms of new media. But it also needs to find—and to have somebody fund—“working-class reporters to write about working-class issues.”
Those issues transcend race, she stated.
“The common interest” of working-class issues of income, wealth and imbalance of power “bonds the American working class more thoroughly than race-based residence,” segregation and other differences “divide us,” Murphy said.