The Bias of Commercialism and the Public Presence of Organized Labor

Philip Glende’s “Labor Reporting and Its Critics in the CIO Years” offers a comprehensive and provocative history of labor reporting from the early 1930s to the early 1950s. It is deeply researched and encyclopedic in scope, and Glende explores the range of activities involved in the production, dissemination, and reception of labor reporting. At bottom, this is a history of the development and meaning of the body of reporting about the labor movement published by mostly northern newspapers in the mid-20th century. Its most important line of analysis interrogates whether this reporting was fair or not. Glende concludes that, on balance, it was not, and his explanations of why this pervasively unfair tone persisted are what makes this essay so rich and rewarding. Glende resists the easy explanation that this tone had to do with active opposition to labor from within the ranks of commercial daily newspapers. In keeping with Michael Schudson’s 1997 suggestion in Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly that scholars take care to avoid an “anticommercial bias” in writing with media history, Glende presents a novel argument about how mainstream journalism could be rightly perceived as unfair to labor. For Glende, the causality did not stem from the fact that publishers’ antipathy to organized labor, though certainly present, biased the news in any particular direction. Instead, Glende argues, we need to examine evolving practices of commercial news distribution and professional reporting to appreciate how “institutional forces” shaped the news. “Bias was not personal,” Glende asserts,