May Day: An A-Z list of how the media foregrounds business interests and erases labour concerns

The fact that the mainstream news media favour business over labour, especially in situations of conflict, is a well-established global phenomenon. The news media’s coverage of labour issues systematically foregrounds elite interests and ignores or misrepresents working-class concerns.

Business interests are framed such that they seem aligned with “national interest” while labour actions are portrayed as disruptive.

For the same reason, impacts to businesses and consumers are covered extensively, while workers’ grievances are marginalised. In terms of representation, the mainstream media heavily rely on the ideas and opinions of business representatives, economists, and government officials while displacing working-class voices.

Labour dynamics are most usually presented as discrete events rather than part of systemic patterns. Structural problems, like health, housing, and education, are attributed to personal failures or responsibilities.

Ordinary citizens have come to see this as natural because decades of neoliberal economic policies and their consequences have been consistently presented as inevitable rather than as political choices.

But ultimately, these mechanisms serve elite interests by normalising exploitation, discouraging collective action and maintaining the economic status quo.

This A-Z list of issues at the intersection of labour and media has been put together on the occasion of International Labour Day to highlight what is at stake in the activity we all spend a...

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