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IF we needed another reason to disdain the billionaires who increasingly dominate our political and cultural life: The Chicago Cubs owner Joe Ricketts shut down several news sites, including Gothamist and LAist because the New York staff tried to unionize.
This is from a new New York Times op-ed by Hamilton Nolan, “A Billionaire Destroyed His Newsroom Out of Spite:”
It is worth being clear about exactly what happened here, so that no one gets too smug. DNAinfo was never profitable, but Mr. Ricketts was happy to invest in it for eight years, praising its work all along. Gothamist, on the other hand, was profitable, and a fairly recent addition to the company. One week after the New York team unionized, Mr. Ricketts shut it all down. He did not try to sell the company to someone else. Instead of bargaining with 27 unionized employees in New York City, he chose to lay off 115 people across America. And, as a final thumb in the eye, he initially pulled the entire site’s archives down (they are now back up), so his newly unemployed workers lost access to their published work. Then, presumably, he went to bed in his $29 million apartment.
They’ve been in retreat in the US for most of my life, but trade unions remain crucial and are important for the creative class, including journalists, just as they have traditionally been for the industrial working class. HERE is my piece for Salon about the pros and cons of unionization.
Oddly, Salon was caught in an ugly union fight while I was there. When I left, more than a year since it began, the instability of the place — constant turnover at both the staff and management level — made it impossible to settle on an agreement.
In any case, this billionaire — who put several people I know out of work — earns the selfish scum award this week.
Yes, “selfish scum” seems about right, if not even strong enough. (The op-ed was hair-raising.)
Thanks for the link to your piece about unions of the past and present. It was terrific–fact-filled, illuminating, and thoughtful.
As long as I can remember (and I’m not even middle-aged any more) there has been an animus against unions, not just in the intelligentsia but in the middle- and lower-middle class too.
I worked for a publisher and was in a union, and almost no new employee ever expressed interest or willingness to join the union. Eventually it dissolved. I have never understood why Americans feel so anti-union, but it does seem to be a fact. And what was even more paradoxical–at least in the past–was that the unions at the time did so much to assure good jobs with benefits. (You do a good job of laying that out in your union piece.)
It is a mystery why they lost the public relations battle. I suppose it’s partly the result of the American myth: that we are all rugged individualists who don’t need any help. And as we can see from current conservative politics, needing help is a sign of unworthiness that need not be addressed.
There might be a liberal or white collar bias against unions, but that is not what I see in the classical music world. The actual issue seems to be that where there is no collective, there can be no collective bargaining. Orchestras, for example, are almost all unionized, even those with fairly low budgets. But composers and song writers are not because they do not work as a collective.
In Germany, where I live part of the time, the choral singers in the opera houses are unionized, but the opera soloists (the musicians who portray the opera’s roles) are not because they do not work as a collective. As a result, the singers in the choir are usually better paid than the soloists. The choirs have permanent contracts with benefits while the soloists are usually hired on a temp basis.
By the same measure, novelists or poets cannot form a union, but the writing teams for popular entertainment can. Same with journalists who work as collectives – which is a form of “infotainment” in the marketplace.
Most forms of the fine arts are not part of the marketplace. Even if classical music composers might have an organization for collecting royalties, 99% of them will never make any significant amount of money because there is virtually no market for contemporary classical music.
This is why all developed countries, except for the USA, have comprehensive systems of public arts funding as part of a social democracy that offers needed alternatives to the marketplace. In the USA, by contrast, there are no politicians advocating such measures, and there is no possibility to vote for such policies. We are not even given a choice. We live in a society with an unmitigated form of capitalism that is totalizing. In such a society, the long-term trajectory will be to destroy unions even in the fields where they can exist.
And of course, there are other issues. The technology of creative destruction, as it were, is helping many artists who work outside of collectives because they can now circumvent the traditional gate keepers and produce and make their work available to large publics. DV video, hard disk recording, Internet streaming, and self-publication have been a source of liberation for many artists working outside the market place. This has created more diversity in our arts world and provide needed alternatives to Hollywood and the pop-music-industrial complex and all of their vulgar banalities. Many people in that world would feel little regret if the pop music industry, Hollywood, and the mainstream news media were greatly disempowered. It’s a new world, and they are happily embracing it.
Yes I am well-acquainted with the cyber-utopian argument — which the big tech companies LOVE to sell to the gullible. “Liberation” is in fact a term they love to use. How these artists are working “outside the marketplace” is something I am not convinced of. It’s still capitalism, just a more raw form that employs fewer people
And yes we’d be a better nation for sure if we had real arts funding. Obama did not exactly overachieve on this one, but Trump and some of his lieutenants in Congress have expressed glee at the hope of killing both the endowments
Liberal/ white collar bias against unions? Probably some, but dwarfed by the way Reagan and his followers, including many to the Right of him like Tea Party and Southern pols who crow about “right to work” states, have been far more assertive on the matter. Union enrollment in US small fraction of what it was in mid-century
To see artists working outside the marketplace, just take a look at about 90% of the artists in the fine arts today. It’s not “still capitalism” but people working without it or around it or in spite of it.
Technology has helped. Same for alternative journalism which is technology has given a life line. Ironically, this blog is a good example. Big tech is a problem, but it has provided a useful challenge to big media which is even worse. In fact, the specious howling about it is mostly coming from big media….
What Republican Pres since Reagan hasn’t crowed about killing the NEA? Is that news? What Democrat has genuinely helped the NEA? Again, no news.
And yes, unions are being decimated, especially since Reagan. But all of these problems began way before the Internet tech boom. So why Internet tech as a big bugaboo?
Much of what we are seeing is the frustration of the fans of the pop-music-industrial-complex –largely a genre for suburban white, male guitar aficionados– and how technology has partially disempowered it and them. Even the Hollywood studios are being challenged by new forms of big tech such as Netflix.
And the ironies continue, since most of the big tech folks are themselves devotees of the pop-culture-industrial-complex. This Orwellian union of big media and big tech is yet another way Californiaism has metastasized.
No question it is a good time for people — visual artists, journalists, whatever — who don’t have to get paid for their work. Most bloggers, me included, are unpaid
Meanwhile, alternative journalistic organizations that have real reporters and editors, rather than pontificators, are struggling and closing down. Boston Phoenix, Village Voice, LA Weekly — all are gone or going.
Breitbart is thriving, and if you want confirmation of various Flat Earth or Holocaust denial theories, it has never been a better time to be a reader
And to be fair, it has never been a better time for those who wish to question things like Judith Miller’s reports in the NYT that started the 2nd Iraq War, or those who want to want understand how the mainstream media attacked Gary Webb due his reports about the US government sanctioned drug running to support the Contras, or the CIA’s role in the massive carnage caused by the so-called Arab Spring. And so on,
In fact, the way the Internet has allowed for legitimately alternative news is part of the reason that the venerable alternative papers you mentioned have disappeared. The Internet does it even better, quicker, cheaper, a wider audience.
The big irony here, and I’m not sure I should mention it, is that you think way outside the mainstream media’s box. The long noses of big media sniff out people like you a mile away and ostracize them. As a journalist with integrity and a genuinely questioning mind, it’s as if you want to be part of a system that will never have you. It’s really too bad there’s not a way of monetizing alternative news on the web. Or would that only lead to its corruption?
The European approach has been the creation of elaborate and extensive state radio and television networks that serve as an alternative to news corporations. Organizations such as the BBC in the UK, the ARD in Germany, and the RAI in Italy show that has worked fairly well. We tend to forget that the best watch dog of the government is often the government itself. This seems to work better than the US system where government and corporate news too often collaborate.
This is one of the reasons my perspectives so often so strongly annoy my fellow Americans. I’m getting my mainstream news from an entirely different source, and one that seems more objective. Virtually no one in Europe, for example, believed that there were really WMDs in Iraq. It was completely obvious to everyone over here that the US invasion was simply a war of illegal aggression and imperialism.
There are lots of books about things like Allen Dulles’ old “Mighty Wurlitzer,” but we have far less understanding about how this corruption has evolved and refined itself since then.
If my comments were as you falsely portray them, they would indeed be sophomoric, but you intentionally misrepresent them and even through the blunt tactic of putting words into my mouth. Very strange.
Anwya, PBS’s Frontline provides a useful overview of the US media’s false reporting about the WMDs, and also notes the journalists who got it right:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/newswar/part1/wmd.html
This reporting is the issue under discussion.
Even if it is a deflection from the point, I appreciate your comments about journalistic work. It’s true that it is only the big media organizations that have the resources for large scale news collection. That’s why alternative media is essential. They provide the analysis to help “unembed” big media’s reporting.
Thanks for the compliment, sort of, but no, Judith Miller did not cause the Gulf War. What she did was awful, but no journalist has that much power and only Sarah Palin would think so. TONS of journalists, including many I know and worked with, though the WMD claim was nonsense and that W. would mishandle things, and said so publicly.
And Webb is a sad story, but, now that the dust has settled, not nearly as simple as the way you frame it.
I suspect there are other reasons people in the States find you — as you say — annoying
I did not say that Judith Miller caused the Iraq War, and you know it. This is the sort of repeated dialog tactic that shows where you lack integrity.
Of course many journalists knew there were no WMDs in Iraq. And yet mainstream US media did not significantly challenge the obviously dishonest reports. People became so skeptical of the US media that there was a large surge in US readership of British papers, especially the Guardian. And after the war started, this was followed by the phenomenon of embedded journalism. All in need of discussion, but I see this won’t happen here.
But you are right on a simplistically literal level. I should have written that her reports (along with the complicity of her editors) *helped* start the Iraq War, that they became a significant part of the rationale. I think that the intention of my comment was clear, but that you read it in bad faith.
Maybe I’m imagining your phrase above — “Judith Miller’s reports in the NYT that started the 2nd Iraq War.” Apparently someone calling himself William Osborne snuck onto my page and posted this. Similar to the way you dubbed many Americans “Neanderthals” and then tried to frame ME as condescending when I called you on it
To be clear: I think Judith Miller’s reporting was shameful and I’d have been happy if she was sent to prison. With stakes less high, Jayson Blair behaved awfully as well. But I would never say that Miller was typical of female journalists, or Blair typical of black reporters. Your blanket dismissal of the press is even more sweeping, unfair and uninformed than those statements would be. There were thousands of newspaper and magazine reporters at that point — there are many thousands fewer now, and many of them, like me, who had nothing to do w WMD/ Gulf War coverage, lost their jobs, their houses, their marriages, and put their families through enormous turmoil bc of this
One of my journalist friends was killed covering the Iraq War; I know others who were imprisoned covering foreign reigimes, or visited African countries — to report stories on famines or coups — where they kill reporters if they catch them
For what it’s worth, I spent roughly as much of my career writing for alternative/ left-of-center outlets as mainstream papers, and my first real job was at a paper owned by a nonprofit trust. The key difference between more mainstream papers — and this means some alt weeklies — and most websites is that print reporters have time to look at documents, ask questions, dig up information powerful people don’t want them to seem, and to do real journalism. My two years at a progressive website threw me in with some very smart people, but there was no time for reporting: We picked up what other people did and shot from the hip, with either a “this is great” or “no, they’re wrong!” Some of this work was good, some was not, but it was — like most websites — essentially parasitic on other, more mainstream and (often) print-based outlets
They’ve done great work, good work, and bad work, but most of what we know about, for ex, Harvey Weinstein’s predatory sexual style, Russian hacking, voter suppression in the South, the financial and political ties between people like Bannon, S Miller, R Mercer, Manafort, etc comes from the Washington Post, NY Times, LA Times, and New Yorker.
You can reject this all as just a big capitalist lie, dismiss the ability if the press to improve or illuminate Amer life the way some say men can never help remedy sexism or white folks are structurally unable to fight racism. But all your comments reveal is a sophomoric, ivory tower view of the world
My response to this latest comment was misplaced. It is above under the time stamp November 8, 2017 at 2:10 pm.
If my comments were as you falsely portray them, they would indeed be sophomoric, but you intentionally misrepresent them and even through the blunt tactic of putting words into my mouth. Very strange.
Anwya, PBS’s Frontline provides a useful overview of the US media’s false reporting about the WMDs, and also notes the journalists who got it right:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/newswar/part1/wmd.html
This reporting is the issue under discussion.
Even if it is a deflection from the point, I appreciate your comments about journalistic work. It’s true that it is only the big media organizations that have the resources for large scale news collection. That’s why alternative media is essential. They provide the analysis to help “unembed” big media’s reporting.