This morning as I was just finishing a lengthy physics assignment, I decided to take a break and see what was happening on the world of Facebook. As I browsed through the late night posts of my friends, one in particular caught my eye. The post was a response to the demonstrations in France, calling them stupid and violent.
While I had to comment (these demonstrations have been largely peaceful!) I couldn't help but wonder, why this seemed so stupid to my US American friends. Which got me thinking about the apathy of our nation. Why is it that American workers don't organize when we've got something to say?...which then got me thinking about organized American workers. What would that look like? Oh yeah. A union.
While the economy is in the news day in and day out, little is being framed from a worker's perspective. Instead, we hear about big business bailouts and corporate takeovers. What could this mean? According to Normon Solomon, it means the US is in a class war. Here's a link to his article on Alternet:
http://www.alternet.org/media/68903?page=1
The article, in my opinion, accurately describes how media sources frame economic issues in the US. In short, the picture painted by the media do not often include unions or other worker's issues in their economic coverage because they oppose big business. This, Solomon argues, is a sure sign that US Americans are fighting a class war, and big businesses have the media on their side.
Another interesting point the author brings up is the cyclical nature of union representation in media. As unions fail, they at the same time receive less media attention. This lack of attention then leads US American workers to believe that unions are obsolete.
While the article is short and a bit vague, it does point out some serious class issues in US American media. It is interesting to consider that anti-union propaganda does not have to be as blatant as those union-bashing short films corporations show their workers in training. In fact, anti-union sentiments seep into all US American media through the lack of representations of worker's issues.
It's amazing how huge the gap between classes is growing in American culture. I absolutely agree that the media is a large contributor to this problem. I especially appreciate this quote from the article:
ReplyDelete"The very affluent of our society don't often pick up a newspaper or tune in the evening news and encounter waves of stories and commentaries about the dire straits of America's poor people and what it's like to be one of them."
Very rarely are the impoverished portrayed accurately - or fairly - in media sources. There is often an attitude among the elite, and I admit even the middle class, that the unemployed or lower class citizens are lazy or uneducated when in fact they are simply suffering from the monopoly of wealth that the top one percent of Americans control. And it doesn't help when media caters to this class of elites and instills negative attitudes about the poor into our culture that prevents alliances such as unions from forming.