Media Econ 101

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This week on CounterSpin: When the New York Times wants to write about the plights and travails of low-wage workers, they can tug a heartstring with the best of them. When it comes to reporting about “the economy”—serious, fact-based stuff, not “human interest”—we get things like the piece the paper ran in late July, with the lead on how “analysts expect the strong economy and Trump administration’s tax cuts to lead to another batch of knockout earnings reports.” One blot on the landscape: “wage growth.” “Rising labor costs can cut into profits, muting the impact of a robust economy,” the Times warns, citing a trucking firm where “driver pay and retention costs” were described as “outlays that nibbled away at the benefits of higher prices and booming volumes.”

Like the “health of the economy” being somehow severed from the livelihood of most people, there are certain economic ideas and values that corporate media either leave unchallenged or aggressively promote. We explore some of those on this week’s CounterSpin.

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(cc photo: Viewmaster)

First up, the idea that some people just don’t deserve to earn a wage—that entire sectors of the workforce can be reliant on the variable noblesse oblige of customers. We talked about the bizarre retention of the tipped wage with author and activist Saru Jayaraman a couple of years ago. We’ll hear part of that conversation.

Transcript: ‘The Vast Majority of Tipped Workers in America Suffer from Three Times the Poverty Rate of the Rest of the US Workforce’

[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin Saru Jayaraman Interview @http://www.fair.org/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin180810Jayaraman.mp3″]

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(image: CFED/IPS)

The same media that largely ignore the sub-minimum wage rarely question the overall belief in social mobility, and in particular the idea that if you can only get a “good job,” US society is set up to guarantee economic success. We disrupted that vision last year with researcher Dedrick Asante-Muhammad, talking about a new report on the racial wealth divide.

Transcript: ‘There is a Strong Reason for All Americans to Feel more Economically Insecure than they Did Before the Great Recession’

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(cc photo: Steve Rhodes)

Finally, the big myth: that the way the US economy is organized is the best or maybe the only way a democratic society can do things—that harms like inequality shadow it, but don’t define it. Economist Richard Wolff took that on in a conversation earlier this year. Source via top10forex.net

Transcript: ‘There’s an Alternative to the Hierarchical, Top-Down Capitalist Corporation’

[mp3-jplayer tracks=”CounterSpin Richard Wolff Interview @http://www.fair.org/audio/counterspin/CounterSpin180810Wolff.mp3″]

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