Love of Labor
That’s a lot to extract from a content analysis–not only what the Tribune reports but why (its “set of assumptions”). When Bruno and his team of graduate students sifted through Tribune stories from 1991 to 2001, they had a hunch what they’d find: “The Chicago Tribune was selected…because its editorializing on labor relations has routinely communicated a conservative point of view and its assaults on organized labor have a long pedigree.”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
The distinction Franklin insists on between the Tribune and the Tribune Company was perfectly encapsulated by a story he and Tim Jones wrote for the November 12, 1994, issue of the paper. Though cut in half by editors and buried inside a Saturday business section, the article nonetheless reported that the Tribune Company (as well as newspaper publishers in other cities) was sending workers to San Francisco to help two strikebound dailies there keep publishing. Four Tribune production workers were already on the scene and “newsroom volunteers” were being solicited.
For whatever reason, this article didn’t make it into UIC’s calculations. Apparently a lot of others didn’t either. Bruno’s team wound up drawing its conclusions from 386 articles culled from the Tribune over the decade, 74 of them under Franklin’s byline. He guesses he averaged about 200 articles a year.
Two years ago Franklin published the book Three Strikes, a study of the labor turmoil in the 90s at the Caterpillar, A.E. Staley, and Bridgestone/Firestone plants in Decatur. “I offer it,” he says angrily, “as a witness’s account of what happens when workplace rules are broken, when unions no longer make workers strong, and when the fruits of progress are no longer meant to be shared, but rather worshiped by most of us from afar.” Studs Terkel’s quoted on the jacket calling the book “labor reportage at its best.”
“When the Tribune writes about what Steve would call ‘working’ issues–job stress, hours of work, etc–and they don’t make the reference somewhere in the piece that there’s a difference between union work and nonunion work, it seems to me a conscious choice to not tell the reader that while stress is a problem at work, it’s handled differently in a union shop than a nonunion shop. When Steve says elegantly we should write about what’s important to workers, I agree, but we should say in the union workplace things work differently….For all of Shawn’s writing about the workplace, I don’t believe her byline came up once. How is it these union workers are made invisible when there are nonunion workplaces and there are union workplaces? If the Tribune did a story flushing out the injustices of sweatshop labor, but nowhere did it say that the unions are fighting sweatshops, then readers are left to think that the answer to sweatshops is government policy and nice employers. But the institution that’s done most to fight sweatshops is labor unions.”
Franklin concedes that Bruno’s right: he’s off the beat. But he prefers to think of himself as a labor reporter who at the moment isn’t writing about labor. For the better part of a year he’s been assigned to a special project, and if he’s yanked from this team effort, chances are it’ll be to go overseas and cover a war in Iraq. Franklin’s other specialty is the Middle East, and that’s where today’s headlines are.
