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.
Below I’ll detail the serious problems with reports by Lisa Autry of WKU Public Radio in Bowling Green, Kentucky, but first you should know why this matters to you no matter where you live.
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.
There’s nothing wrong with marketing ideology, only with not being honest about what you are doing.
These tax-exempt outfits operate on the model of Madison Avenue; reinforcing instincts, hopes, and desire to stir demand for what may not be good for you or be of dubious effectiveness.
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.
Midwestern and southern states have been enacting anti-worker laws that take away collective bargaining rights, while forcing unions to represent people who do not share in the costs of collective bargaining and protecting workers in grievance proceedings. Other laws directly reduce compensation, especially pensions, although police and firefighters are generally shielded.
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.
The NPR report was about Kentucky counties that are passing so-called “right to work” laws, a worthy topic for sure.
Early on, reporter Lisa Autry makes this untrue statement: “Democrats have rejected efforts to allow employees in unionized companies the freedom to choose whether to join a union.”
No law requires workers to join a union under a binding U.S. Supreme Court decision. Congress outlawed the “closed shop” in the 1947 Taft-Hartley Act, formally known as the Labor Management Relations Act.
Workers at firms with union contracts are only required to pay dues that cover the costs of representing them in negotiating contracts and grievance procedures.
Russell D. Lewis, the NPR Southern bureau chief who edited Autry’s report, told me he was only vaguely aware of the Taft-Hartley Act and did not recognize her error.
From an economic perspective, what so-called “right to work” laws do is allow workers to enjoy the benefits of collective bargaining and contract enforcement without sharing in the costs. This is a form of moral hazard that weakens unions and makes it likely that they will fail because of what economists call the free rider problem: Those who do not share in the costs of negotiating contracts and enforcing them enjoy the same benefits and protections as those who do.
Autry’s NPR report failed to mention a central fact – Kentucky’s highest court ruled in 1965 that cities and counties cannot adopt local collective bargaining laws. In a case that unions brought against Jesse Puckett, mayor of Shelbyville, Kentucky’s highest court ruled (emphasis added):
it is not reasonable to believe that Congress could have intended to [leave to local governments] the determination of policy in such a controversial area as that of union-security agreements. We believe Congress was willing to permit varying policies at the state level, but could not have intended to allow as many local policies as there are local political subdivisions in the nation. It is our conclusion that Congress has pre-empted from cities the field undertaken to be entered by the Shelbyville ordinance.
In reports for her local NPR station, Autry never cited this. She did, however, a report on a politician who told her that equal numbers of people believe a county-level ordinance would be legal or illegal. In another report, on whether counties have the legal authority to pass such laws, she said, “the answer depends on who you ask.”
It took me less than a minute using an Internet search engine to find the 1965 case. It was also cited in a nuanced and balanced January news report in the Louisville Courier-Journal. Even cub reporter Gina Clear of the News-Enterprise in Elizabethtown, KY provided coverage that was balanced and far better informed than Autry’s.
Did Autry fail to report the court decision because of laziness, poor judgment, or anti-union bias? I cannot give you a definitive answer because Autry and Kevin Willis, WKU’s news director, ignored my repeated requests for an interview, passing the buck to Lewis.
Strange, journalists who expect people to return their calls but do not hold themselves to that standard.
My review of several dozen Autry pieces suggests a bias against unions and workers.
Autry tends to quote anti-unionists at length, but paraphrase what union leaders say, though she did one report that explained union perspectives.
She frequently does one-sided reports using language that assumes only anti-union policies have merit, and quotes only anti-union sources. She also did a one-sided report against increasing the minimum wage.
Lewis, the NPR editor, noted that Autry quoted a United Auto Workers local official saying that Alabama and Mississippi, both with so-called “right to work” laws, have “some of the worst education, highest poverty. What happens is that as they reduce the union labor, less and less [sic] people are making a decent wage.”
But Autry followed that quote with a bizarre point to impeach the union official’s remarks: “Actually, since World War II, income and job growth have increased faster in right-to-work states.”
That might be relevant to a story about how Jim Crow laws kept, and still keep, blacks from many well-paying jobs. Or in a story about how taxpayer investments, especially in the Interstate Highways, canals, and electricity, opened the South to building factories after the war.
Autry cited no source. Lewis sent me a report by the Mackinac Center, another libertarian marketing agency. It is much more nuanced than Autry’s flat statement.
And actually, to invoke Autry’s word, what would be relevant would be current data on household incomes in states with and without laws requiring workers to pay for the benefits they get from any union that represents them.
In 2013 the median household income (half make more, half less) was $49,087 in so-called “right to work” states, but $56,746 in other states. That means in the states with diminished worker rights people have to work a full year plus eight weeks to get what their peers earn in a year.
Autry’s piece and Lewis’s editing seem to violate NPR’s ethics handbook, which says “good editors are also good prosecutors. They test, probe and challenge reporters, always with the goal of making NPR’s stories as good (and therefore as accurate) as possible.”
The handbook also says “attribute everything… When in doubt, err on the side of attributing — that is, make it very clear where we’ve gotten our information (or where the organization we give credit to has gotten its information). Every NPR reporter and editor should be able to immediately identify the source of any facts in our stories — and why we consider them credible. And every reader or listener should know where we got our information.”
In her NPR piece and a number of WKU reports, Autry quotes the Bluegrass Institute, which she describes as “a Kentucky-based think tank that advocates for smaller government.”
With just two employees, it doesn’t have much capacity to think.
What Autry neglected to report was that the Bluegrass Institute is an ad agency for Kochian ideas. It is also part of a network that is funded by corporate interests closely allied with the American Legislative Exchange Council (ALEC), which poses as a nonpartisan advocate for smaller government and more federalism, but is funded by corporations opposed to unions, the Koch Brothers, and their confreres. While the network says its members are independent, behind closed doors it operates like an ideological Ikea selling libertarian ideas, The New Yorker magazine reported.
Editor Lewis told me he had no idea about the Bluegrass Institute’s connections.
Lewis also indicated he was not troubled by using the term “right to work,” which is both factually inaccurate and politically loaded. Based on the evidence I call them right-to-work-for-less laws. NPR surely should explain to listeners that an abundance of official data (and economic theory) show that union workers make more than their non-union counterparts.
Autry ended her NPR piece with another falsehood: “Meanwhile, several labor unions — including some from out of state — have filed a federal lawsuit to stop Kentucky’s local right-to-work movement.”
All of the unions represent workers in the county where the lawsuit was filed, a fact anyone who read the lawsuit should know. Irwin “Buddy” Cutler, the lawyer who filed the case, noted that to have standing – the right to sue – the union would have to represent workers in the county where the dispute exists.
Lewis said he did not know that, which explains his failure to ask what strikes me as an obvious question. Beyond that, what purpose did ending on this (false) point serve?
NPR owes listeners a corrective. It also needs to balance its reports and use relevant data. More importantly, all news organizations need to be wary of “think tanks” bearing easy information.
By: David Cay Johnston, The National Memo, March 21, 2015
March 23, 2015
Posted by raemd95 |
Journalism, Media, Right To Work Laws | ALEC, Anti-Union, Bluegrass Institute, Collective Bargaining, Koch Brothers, Nonprofit Research Organizations, Russell D. Lewis, Unions, Workers |
Leave a comment
Every once in a while the universe arranges itself to make you look smarter than you are. Lucky me, I am having such a moment now.
Last month, when NBC News anchor Brian Williams’ career imploded as he was caught in a high-profile, self-aggrandizing lie, I suggested in this space that there would be much less angst or fallout if someone from Fox “News” were caught lying.
Enter Bill O’Reilly.
Shortly after I wrote that, the liberal Mother Jones magazine ran a story questioning his claim to have been in the combat zone in the Falkland Islands while covering that war for CBS. From his Fox podium, O’Reilly dismissed Mother Jones as the “bottom rung of journalism in America,” which was gushing praise next to his takedown of reporter David Corn, a “liar,” an “irresponsible guttersnipe,” a “far-left zealot” and “dumb.”
Since then, however, other news organizations have reported other instances of questionable assertions on O’Reilly’s part.
For instance, he has long said he was outside the home of a figure in the John F. Kennedy assassination and heard the shot when the man killed himself. That suicide happened in Palm Beach. Former colleagues say O’Reilly was in Dallas that day.
He has claimed he was “attacked by protesters” while covering the 1992 Los Angeles riots for Inside Edition. Former colleagues say he is exaggerating an incident where an angry man took a piece of rubble to a camera.
O’Reilly has said he witnessed the execution of a group of American nuns in El Salvador. That happened in 1980. O’Reilly apparently did not reach El Salvador until 1981.
For the one falsehood, Williams received a six-month suspension without pay. For a handful of apparent falsehoods, O’Reilly has received unstinting support from his bosses at Fox.
This rather neatly makes the point I sought to make a month ago. Namely, that Fox — the window-dressing presence of a few bona fide reporters notwithstanding — is not a real news-gathering organization but, rather, the propaganda arm of an extreme right wing that grows ever more cult-like and detached from reality as time goes by. Fox is a belief system, not a news network. Exhibit A is the fact that O’Reilly is not now fighting for his professional life.
To anticipate what his believers will say in his defense: Yes, he is a pundit and yes, pundits are entitled to their opinions. But that does not release them from the obligation to be factual.
It is telling that Fox recently responded to sharp questions about all this from MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow by sending her a statement noting that O’Reilly’s ratings are up despite the controversy. To act as if ratings answer, or even address, questions of credibility is to express contempt for the very notion of credibility. It suggests Fox’s full-body embrace of the old saying, often attributed to Barnum, about the birth rate of suckers.
But why shouldn’t Fox be sanguine? People who mistake it for a news outlet will never hold it accountable for failing to be one, because in the final analysis, news is not really what it promises them, nor what they seek. Rather, what it promises and what they seek is an alternate reality wherein birthers make sensible arguments, death panels are real, Trayvon was the thug, Sarah Palin is a misunderstood genius, and all your inchoate fears of the looming Other are given intellectual cover so they no longer look like the scaredy-cat bigotry they are.
It gives its viewers what they need. It tells them what they want to hear.
Because it does and because that’s all they ask, O’Reilly’s troubles will soon very likely blow away. Yes, he is apparently a serial fabulist. And yes, that would disqualify you from most newsrooms.
But this is Fox.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist for The Miami Herald; The National Memo, March 11, 2015
March 14, 2015
Posted by raemd95 |
Bill O'Reilly, Fox News, Journalism | Bigotry, Brian Williams, El Salvador, Falkland Islands, JFK Assassination, LA Riots, Rachel Maddow, Reporters |
1 Comment
There’s this speech I give my students. Distilled, it goes like this.
“Your primary asset as a journalist is not your dogged curiosity, your talent for research or your ability to make prose sing on deadline. No, your one indispensable asset is your credibility. If you are not believable, nothing else matters.”
Which brings us, inevitably, to Brian Williams. The NBC Nightly News anchor saw his career crumple like used Kleenex last week after he repeated one time too many a story he has been telling for years: how a U.S. military helicopter on which he was a passenger was shot down over Iraq in 2003.
But the man who was flight engineer on that copter said on Facebook that Williams was never on it. Instead, he was on the one trailing it. Williams apologized for conflating the two, blaming the “fog” of memory.
The incident was remarkably similar to candidate Hillary Clinton’s false 2008 claim that she came under sniper fire as First Lady during a 1996 visit to Bosnia. As it turns out, an American dignitary was shot at in Bosnia — just not Clinton. Rather, it was then-Sen. Olympia Snowe, six months before.
Then, as now, one is tempted to ascribe the lapse to false memory, that phenomenon where you recall with clarity things that never happened. Then, as now, one is hampered by the sheer drama of the events in question. A person may honestly misremember eating at a certain restaurant or seeing a given movie. But you’d think you’d be pretty clear on whether or not somebody almost killed you.
So now, people are poring over old newscasts to determine whether this is an isolated incident. A statement by Williams of seeing bodies outside his hotel during Hurricane Katrina was initially mocked, but has been found on closer inspection to be more credible than first believed.
Fans of Fox “News,” at least to judge from my email queue, are having a ball with all this. I wrote a column a few weeks back blasting Fox for its habitual, ideology-driven inaccuracy. Attacking Fox is not for the faint of heart. Its viewers (like Rush Limbaugh’s listeners) tend to take it personally, responding with such a nasty, visceral outrage that a body might think you’d blasphemed their deity rather than criticized their news outlet. I savaged CNN in this space last year and while some folks took issue, no one called me a “bleephole” or invited me to “bleep” myself. With Fox fans, that’s the salutation.
So this latest news brings a flood of email crowing over Williams’ troubles and demanding I give him equal treatment.
As I wrote in the aforementioned column, serious people do not take Fox seriously. Indeed, consider the level of angst, the sense of expectations betrayed, that has attended Williams’ failure and ask yourself: Would there be a similar outpouring if someone at Fox had told this whopper?
Unlikely.
Fox is what Fox is, but its distortions and mendacities are generally only mistaken for gospel by a stratum of the electorate already predisposed to its bizarre worldview. The rest of us like to think we can expect a higher standard from the old guard of the news media, meaning the likes of CBS, NBC and The New York Times. And usually we can.
But every time that belief is betrayed — meaning not garden variety errors of fact, but catastrophic failures of journalistic integrity — the damage is exponentially greater precisely because the level of trust is exponentially higher. Such failures feed the disaffection and cynicism of a politically polarized nation where the universally accepted fact is an endangered species.
It’s a state of affairs that makes it hard to run a country. Or to be one.
So people asking that I give Brian Williams equal treatment are missing the point. If, indeed, he lied, then his sins are not equal to Fox’s.
They are worse.
By: Leonard Pitts, Jr., Columnist for The Miami Herald; The National Memo, February 11, 2015
February 12, 2015
Posted by raemd95 |
Brian Williams, Fox News, Journalism | CNN, Hillary Clinton, Hurricane Katrina, Iraq War, Journalists, NBC Nightly News, News Media |
Leave a comment
Brian Williams has come a cropper – a useful English expression for falling off your high horse. The NBC News anchor exposed a malady of the American news media, because he had the worst case of it. Deftly told tales of danger flared up on news and comedy shows, even on rival CBS and at a Rangers hockey game. More than any other leading anchor, the preening Williams acted like he was in show business. And he’s clearly smitten with the military, taking a cue from his predecessor Tom Brokaw, who wrote “The Greatest Generation,” the blockbuster book about the World War II generation. In peacetime, Brokaw started a process of glowing (retro) war coverage with his valedictory book.
Williams furthered that fawning trend when he took over the chair as the “NBC Nightly News” standard-bearer. But the stakes were higher, because suddenly, it was wartime. The longest wars in our history, in Afghanistan and Iraq, were upon us. And all the world was a stage for his stand-ups.
Since 9/11, Williams and many in the media became too cozy and close with the military. I mean, literally, too close, sharing fatigues, meals and living space. But the volunteer military has a job to do and so do people in the press covering wars. They are best kept at a distance. In the Vietnam War, the press was confrontational and skeptical of the Pentagon – and properly so. The daily press briefing was dubbed “the Five O’Clock Follies.” Reporters knew the government was telling lies every day. The two Iraq wars were covered like sporting events at first, with broadcast and print media cheerleading the invasion of Iraq a dozen years ago. The stories they missed on the job have filled many books, such as Thomas Ricks’ “Fiasco.”
The broadcast media seemed happy to befriend the military and hang out in tanks and helicopters with them for visual color. It became cool to “embed” in the desert – an approach the Pentagon encouraged and put into place with the brief first Gulf War. Thus the Pentagon shrewdly seduced the media in an “embed” embrace. Some correspondents who embedded died along the way, including David Bloom of NBC News and Michael Kelly of the The New Republic. It all seemed futile, being along for a ride. In a dusty foreign desert, it’s hard to break great stories about people whom you think are protecting your life.
“Four birds in the desert.” Williams used such vivid language to describe being aboard one of four Chinook helicopters as the Iraq War was getting underway in 2003. One “bird” was hit. He tells the story well, except it wasn’t true. He spoke on a comedy show about it and tried to hide his false pride at surviving an “RPG” attack, as if everyone talks that way. The helicopter Williams was on did not come under fire, but what’s the difference between friends? Williams rubbed shoulders with soldiers in uniform, and perhaps felt he could share their valor.
But he was supposed to be one of us – the press. To be clear, I worked at CBS News as my first journalism job. In network news, I’ve seen the best in action and perhaps I judge Williams too harshly. His survival shall largely depend on ratings. Whatever happens, the cautionary note here: A string of tall tales went on for years unchecked by Williams’ peers at the best networks and newspapers, as well as the usual chorus of media critics.
Ironically, a respected military newspaper finally turned Williams in for his on-air fibbing. Travis Tritten, a Stars and Stripes reporter, said discontent had been building up for years with Williams’ rash storytelling. “We were there to give them a voice,” he said, referring to those in the armed forces and veterans. A military newspaper did the work and got the story straight. The lines between civilian and military became bright and clear here. For that, we in the Fourth Estate should be grateful and humbled.
By: Jamie Stiehm, Washington Whispers, U. S. News and World Report, February 9, 2015
February 10, 2015
Posted by raemd95 |
Brian Williams, Journalism, U. S. Military | Afghanistan War, Broadcast Media, Embeds, Iraq War, media, NBC Nightly News, The Press, Tom Brokaw, Travis Tritten |
Leave a comment
Unknown Feed
mykeystrokes.com 