How The Media Enable The Anti-Worker Movement
Intentionally or not, news organizations often help the Koch brothers, ALEC, and other enemies of labor.
NPR Morning Edition aired a report this week that reeked of anti-union bias, and inadvertently promoted the Koch brothers agenda to reduce collective bargaining rights, which means smaller wages and benefits.
The report was rife with errors, missing facts, bollixed concepts, and a meaningless comparison used to impeach a union source.
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A serious, very well-funded, and thoroughly documented movement to pay workers less and reduce their rights, while increasing the rights of employers, is gaining traction as more states pass laws that harm workers. A host of proposals in Congress would compound this if passed and signed into law.
News organizations help this anti-worker movement, even if they do not mean to, when they get facts wrong, lack balance, provide vagaries instead of telling details, and fail to apply time-tested reporting practices to separate fact from advocacy.
The advocates are sophisticated. They pose as nonprofit research organizations, but are better described as ideological marketing agencies.
These tax-exempt outfits ...
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Carefully read, their reports are mostly assertions with a sprinkling of cherry-picked facts and projections, which I have found, reviewing them years later, turned out to be wrong.
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A key part of this strategy is creating the impression that unions are bad for workers. This goes to a problem that Presidents John Adams and James Madison feared would destroy the nation the rise of a business aristocracy that would trick people whose only income was from wages into supporting policies that would be good for the business aristocrats, but bad for workers.
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