There is such a thing as business reporting and there's maybe a handful of labor journalists throughout, you know, in these various publications. I don't think CNN has a labor journalist. The people who work in those verticals don't question the genre. It's just sort of seen as an axiom that, oh, we need to center the quote unquote consumer. But it's baked into the reporting genre to the professional norms.
In this public News Brief, we break down media coverage of the potential UPS strike––and the trend more broadly in labor coverage––that paints a strike as something that harms "the consumer" or "the economy" rather than what it is: the only thing that gives workers any power.
Our guest is writer and media analyst Teddy Ostrow, host of The Upsurge podcast.