Michael Alex
2009
www.teachlearnchange.org
The Customer is Always Right: Media Coverage of the 2009 York Strike and Decline of Democratic Values Michael Kristopher Alex
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Michael Alex
2009
www.teachlearnchange.org
In the endless debate about whether the mainstream news media tend to exhibit a left or right‐wing bias, a widespread assumption has been accepted as received truth: politics and ideological commitments are enemies of high‐quality journalism. However, we would do well to interrogate this belief. Instead, one might ask: compared to the clear erosion in popular and media support for democratic values, do the supposed challenges presented by political bias in the news really matter? Charges of political bias in the media tend to be made, unsurprisingly, most often in the context of competing and highly charged political claims about the substantive content of news stories themselves. When an issue raises political hackles and divides people along oppositional ideological ramparts, claims that media coverage is biased one way or the other – or frequently both simultaneously – follow in short order. This was amply demonstrated in the media coverage of the strike that led to a months‐long labour stalemate and cancellation of classes at York University this past winter. All labour actions are politically contentious. The highly contested nature of strikes makes them a potent source of public debate. Because strikes so often disrupt business‐as‐usual and inconvenience the public, they tend to polarize supporters and opponents in short order. When a strike, like this one by teaching assistants and contract faculty occurs within the perceived privilege of the ivory tower, when tens of thousands of students feel the brunt of cancelled classes, when a strike sets records for duration, public debate can quickly descend into claims and counter‐claims of bias. Nowhere
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Michael Alex
2009
www.teachlearnchange.org
are such charges made as apparently as in and about the print media. This is no doubt due to the long and highly partisan history of daily newspapers in Canada themselves. The Toronto Star is a pro‐labour mouthpiece. The Globe and Post advocate for business interests that are hostile to unions. These tropes have become conventional wisdom. Like the strike itself, early coverage of the strike in the print media was largely uneventful. It tended to focus on providing updates on negotiation, highlighted a few of the most controversial bargaining issues, or provided stock references to the penchant for an active and often divisive political climate at York University itself. Indeed, in early print stories, few intelligent questions were posed or contextual background was offered. Missing were well‐researched pieces providing insight into either the strike or York’s reputation as a hotbed of faculty and student radicalism. Instead, reports often descended to the level of lazy rhetoric. The strike was portrayed more as a nuisance or object for ridicule than a problem deserving serious attention. For most of the strike’s duration, mostly cursory update‐style coverage made this question moot. Stories were rarely long enough to exhibit overt bias. Yet as the strike dragged on and media attention intensified in lock step with public outrage, major media outlets often debunked the myths of their own supposed political leanings: Carol Goar in particular in the Star articulated indignation with the strikers by reciting a laundry list of free‐market prescriptions that she labeled as “strong medicine.” Because, she reasoned, “York is a sick school.”i Meanwhile, at the
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Michael Alex
2009
www.teachlearnchange.org
Post, Craig Offman upset conventional wisdom by providing a balanced analysis that critiqued funding shortfalls and argued university teachers are “crucial to Canada’s economic future.”ii Despite the amount of energy spent and ink spilt on perpetual debates about bias, they ignore a more problematic reality: the shortcuts we so often take in labeling particular papers as politically biased this way or that obscures a far more trenchant problem. We have lost sight of the fundamental values that underpin our democracy. Instead, we have adopted the language and cadence of capitalism at the expense of a meaningful appreciation of and interaction with each other as members of a common body politic. The news media, one of the few institutions outside of public education that can teach and support these values have been co‐ opted in what has arguably amounted to an unacknowledged war on democracy. As consideration of print news treatment of the strike at York University makes clear, just because something is ignored or misunderstood does not make it any less powerful a political reality. Criticisms of editorial spin in the news media have distracted Canadian journalists and audiences alike from the reality that, while so many have fought partisan battles, democracy itself has been fundamentally undermined by an individualistic, consumer‐based perspective that is deeply hostile to many of the values inherent in responsible citizenship: a commitment to equity and fairness, membership and participation in a larger public community, and a willingness to mediate one’s own selfish interests with responsibility to and for one’s neighbours.
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Michael Alex
2009
www.teachlearnchange.org
No ideological position has a monopoly on these commitments, or our common failures to meet them. Luckily, in Canada, most journalists and news commentators employ discretion to faithfully serve the public trust. Yes, they portray issues in ways that subtly, even imperceptibly shape public opinion. In doing so, they inevitably betray their own perspectives and impose them on the daily news. Editors decide what stories run. Reporters decide what questions to ask and what stories to chase down. However committed, journalists today are constrained by the limitations of their own work environments – York faculty are hardly the only group coping with the realities of misplaced priorities and the harsh realities of a free‐market paradigm that is too often unsympathetic to the costs associated with paying the bills for democracy. Instead, high quality public education and an adequately funded news media have been reduced to frills sentenced to death by a thousand cuts. In such an atmosphere – where journalists are squeezed to meet the demand of a relentless twenty‐four hour news cycle with fewer and fewer resources – that any collective labour action would be given a chilly reception should not surprise. Also, recent changes in our news landscape have made the news media that much more vital. In the context of a few homogenized media conglomerates controlling overwhelming scope to produce news, the substance and tone of coverage does much to shape the tone of political debates at dinner tables and at water coolers across the country. In a demographically diverse and geographically dispersed country like Canada, the ability to provide a coherent national story that
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Michael Alex
2009
www.teachlearnchange.org
unifies public attention is profoundly powerful. This is more rather than less the case given the specialization and fragmentation that has accompanied the innovations of Internet news delivery and the endless diversions of the blogosphere. Print media coverage of the York strike bore this out. As the strike wore on, values antithetical to democratic society were evident throughout news coverage. Increasingly, we have reduced education to mere accreditation. Tuition is thought to buy papers that are proofs of purchase rather than symbols of research or reflection. Students are portrayed as and begin to act like consumers, not learners. Parents fret about the bills they must pay and the failure to get satisfaction for services rendered. In the coverage of the York strike, these corrupted values took the form of populist anger, one that was as intense as it was shallow and poorly informed. Media coverage tended to focus on controversy since anger and dissatisfaction sell better than depth or nuance. Moreover, by focusing on particular individual victims of the strike (and there were many people who suffered, including the strikers, many whom were themselves graduate students), the press tended to support simplistic narratives about the conflict. Rather than considering the growth of class sizes, the reduction of well‐supported faculty or cuts to post‐secondary funding that coincided with a decade‐long spike in enrolment, more colourful stories were concocted. These posed specialized academic work that is increasingly done by contract employees who enjoy little job security as an easy life. Union members were simultaneously lazy and politically radical as they pushed for more benefits while the economy
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Michael Alex
2009
www.teachlearnchange.org
around them tanked. Critics pointed to their unreasonable demands, accusing them of pursuing an agenda of greed on backs of suffering students and their hard working families. Thus, the press largely provided an outlet for a culture of complaint. From reading most media coverage of the strike, one might have wondered why students would bother attending university at all given the lack of respect the general public and most commentators seemingly had for higher education or the relative value of those who work to provide it. Nowhere are these priorities clearer than in the discussion boards for online commentary that now accompany most web‐based news stories. Public debate is of course only as informed as its participants. Since only a small minority of commentators have a direct connection to particular news stories being discussed, online rants are, in turn, a reflection of the relative of quality of mainstream press coverage itself. When stories recycle old news, treat important matters of public policy as sport, reduce complex labour negotiations to antagonistic he‐said, she‐said battles, fail to give needed context to inform readers and, most damningly, peddle myths and anger rather than elevating the level of discussion, democratic discourse as a whole suffers. If the discussion of the York strike on the newspaper websites is any indication, we are scraping a very low point in the history of public discourse indeed. Our overweening focus on the individual, the consumer knows no ideological boundaries, like a pathogen, it has spread throughout all of the mainstream press with little regard for particular partisan concern. It has infected the very core of the
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Michael Alex
2009
www.teachlearnchange.org
body politic. Addressing ourselves to fighting this infection of democratic principles should be the political project to which the news media direct their attention lest they further amplify and compound this deeply unhealthy habit. It is no coincidence that a me‐first, the‐customer‐is‐always‐right mantra holds a dominant, even unquestioned position in public consciousness. The public needs to be taught the value of education and democracy. The media can be one of the most effective teachers of these lessons. At the strike’s conclusion, one that was only achieved through a legislated back‐to‐work order, the news media changed the channel as quickly as so many of the previously outraged commentators on their message boards. Only a handful of postscripts on the strike were run. Though dire warnings about the lasting effects the strike would have on York were published, little new context was offered. No stories ran on the premier’s suggestion that a committee be struck to avoid such disputes in the future. Little mention was made of the systemic problems that underwrote the strike conflict: funding shortfalls, growing dependence on non‐ tenured faculty to teach university courses, deteriorating standards of quality education in university classrooms far from the halls of York, now slowly lumbering into action. Instead, the Star smirked at York’s efforts to recover: “Flunking out? York U. offers a free do‐over.”iii Now more than ever, in an age of declining news readership and anemic rates of democratic participation, we need a vigorously engaged media. If the main source of information in a society is beholden to economic values rather than
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Michael Alex
2009
www.teachlearnchange.org
democratic objectives, attention spans narrow, citizens become stakeholders, and equity is reduced to a mere commodity for exchange rather than a statement of social value. Only a commitment to delivering news that skirts hollow debates about partisanship and instead focuses on a critical defense against narcissistic individualism can provide the necessary antidote to these bad habits of mind that have overtaken our public discourse. That the customer is always right is rarely questioned. If, however, we elevate the customer to a position exalted above that of citizen, who wins or loses in a particular labour dispute is of minor importance. York has been much maligned for enduring three strikes in slightly more than a decade. However, if we do not rescue our news media from the grasp of a mindset that is hostile democracy, it will be the Canadian people who will have struck out.
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Michael Alex
2009
www.teachlearnchange.org
Notes: i Carol Goar. “Strike at York leaves deep wounds.” Toronto Star. January 28, 2009.
http://www.thestar.com/comment/article/578266 ii Craig Offman. “Universities facing labour time bomb.” National Post. January 24, 2009. http://www.financialpost.com/news‐sectors/story.html?id=1213174 iii Louise Brown. “Flunking out? York U. offers a free do‐over.” Toronto Star. January 28, 2009. http://www.thestar.com/News/GTA/article/585589
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