[lbo-talk] NYT on French unions

Gar Lipow the.typo.boy at gmail.com
Fri Mar 31 12:10:31 PST 2006


On 3/31/06, Nathan Newman <nathanne at nathannewman.org> wrote:
> ----- Original Message -----
> From: "Dennis Claxton" <ddclaxton at earthlink.net>
> -You've said here that people criticizing unions don't
> -offer any ideas. Here's one. Take that union war chest and buy some
> -media outlets. Maybe even Pacifica. Make them an offer they can't
> -refuse. Clearly the decisive thing last week was a few days of
> -saturation media coverage. That turned a 20,000 person Cesar Chavez
> -day into a half million that nobody can deny.
>
> No, media control was not the key issue, or else Pacifica could be calling
> out mass rallies in New York, LA, New York, DC and San Francisco every
> weekend. In this particular event, there is little doubt that media was a
> key source of information, but it was only because people were primed
> because of anti-immigrant attacks that they listened and turned out.
>
> Maybe owning more media would be a useful thing for unions, but as the
> Pacifica example emphasizes, owning an outlet doesn't get you much unless
> the message is right. And when the message is right, you usually don't need
> to own the media to get it out-- you usually can find others to carry it, as
> happened with the organizers of the LA march.
>
> --- Nathan Newman
>

Nathan you are half right, and half not. Owning media not the solution unless the message is right - evident. Finding someone else to carry it for you - very unusual.

You were able to find someone else because that some else had interests that ran (for the moment) with the immigrants. The corporate spanish language media depends on friends of undocumented workers, relatives of the undoucmented and the undoucmented themselves. Not taking a stand on this would have lost them audience and opened them up to competeition. Plus I suspect that many of the workers and owners in those stations were personally opposed to the new bigger anti-immigrant iron heel. So you were able to get this message through. At the beginning of the Iraq war no amount of "getting the mesage right" would have put anti-war messages through the corporate. So left or union ownership and control (because ownership and control are not always the same thing) of a major media outlet would be very productive indeed if you could get the message right. Whether it is worth the cost is another debate; but no amount of "getting the messsage right" without media ownership and control could anything like the information out that getting the message right could with media ownership and control.



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