In his criticism of the media's coverage of current events in The Brass Check Upton Sinclair stressed its treatment of labor, discussing in particular its coverage of labor strikes. Discussing at particular length the strikes in the West Virginia and Colorado coal fields, and the Michigan copper mines, in the 1912-1914 period, he stressed how the press never missed a chance to associate strikes with violence in the public mind, with the strikers invariably the cause and perpetrators of the violence, rather than the victims they principally were (for, in the terms of the Herman-Chomsky analysis, strikers were "unworthy victims").
In cases this had to do with selective reporting, following the "simple and elemental rule--if strikers are violent, they get on the wires, while if strikers are not violent, they stay off the wires," even when it is a question of a very large strike going on for months. One may add that if there was no violence of the kind they wanted to report they were often prepared to say there was, as Sinclair showed when comparing side by side the Associated Press' coverage with the facts as reported in sworn affidavits vindicated by Congressional investigation in the case of the Michigan strike. The result was "that nine-tenths of the telegraphic news you read about strikes is news of violence," conduct which "irrevocably" engraved "the idea-association: Strikes--violence! Violence--strike!" in the public's imagination.
Looking at the news we see today that the same filthy practice is alive and well, if mainly deployed to malign groups other than strikers these days, with very few batting an eye at any of it.
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