Thrown into a defensive position by aggressive monopolies, media workers unions seek new sources of strength.
Bay Area media unions, like those everywhere else in the country, live today in the shadow of Detroit. Newspaper workers at the Detroit News and Free Press have been on strike for three years, since walking out in 1995 over corporate demands for deep concessions. Although the National Labor Relations Board ruled this year that the newspapers’ management had engaged in illegal bad-faith bargaining, a decision that gave strikers the right to immediate reinstatement with back pay, the two newspapers continue to run with strike breakers. The sorry state of U.S. labor law allows employers to appeal NLRB decisions for years through the courts. In the meantime, only a handful of strikers have been rehired, and there is still no contract or union at the papers. Continue reading THE STATE OF OUR UNIONS, by David Bacon→
Writers and photographers during the Vietnam war considered it their responsibility to expose the lies of the Pentagon’s propaganda machine, and they often did so brilliantly. But reporters during Desert Storm and in the war in Afghanistan have generally accepted a different role, willingly or unwillingly, and pictured those wars within the political limits dictated by Generals Schwartzkopf and Franks. Continue reading INTERVIEW: LINDA FOLEY, PRESIDENT NEWSPAPER GUILD. by David Bacon.→
“Yesterday had to be one of the worst days,” begins the email from Dalia, a 21-year-old Palestinian-American journalist, to her friends. “Israelis have gone into all media stations and either taken them over or searched them.”
Dalia works in Ramallah for Al-Jazeera–the popular Qatar-based satellite news channel and one of the few international news media that could continue news coverage in Ramallah during the Israeli-imposed 24-hour curfew that lasted almost a month (March 29-April 24). Continue reading Palestinian Media Bulldozed – by Cherine Badawi and Marc Sapir→
The Obama administration has taken a lot of heat recently for declaring war on Fox News, including from Chronicle columnist Debra J. Saunders. And it’s true that you can’t have presidential staffers ducking press inquiries. But media lies and distortions are another ball game entirely. Let’s look at the record:
