Through Jaundiced Eyes: How the Media View Organized Labor

Puette, who teaches at the University of Hawaii, has produced a useful but thin survey, documenting a consistently negative depiction of labor unions in movies, television, cartoons and the press. Low public opinion of organized labor, he suggests, is linked not only to weakened unions but to this sagging portrayal. Puette finds the corrupt union image from On the Waterfront a pervasive influence and notes that most television dramas espouse the viewpoint of the employer or consumer, not of the worker. Newspapers, he writes, no longer dedicate resources to a labor beat; but Puette weakens his argument by focusing on the Hawaiian dailies' placement of labor stories next to crime stories--hardly industry practice. Puette deconstructs selected TV news reports and offers case studies, including one of the 1989 United Mine Workers' Pittston strike, in which the major media concentrated on strike violence to the exclusion of substantive questions. Puette concludes that the putative liberalism of America's media excludes support for labor; had he integrated that observation further into his study and explored the reasons for it, this book would have been richer. Illustrated. (June)