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Trades unions and the media
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be the first to commentPosted by Tom O'Malley
Talk by Tom O'Malley (CPBF) to the media fringe meeting at UCU Congress, Manchester on Thursday29 May 2014.
My job today is to provide some context for the discussion about trade unions and the media. I want to outline some of the points in the history of the movement where the trades unions and the wider Labour movement have had to confront and deal with the media. The first thing to recognise is that Trades Unions do not constitute some uniform political voice. Although they have been the mainstay of the Labour Party, many individual trade unions and trades unionists have not been Labour supporters, or have actively worked with opponents of the Labour Party. But what Trades Unions share in common is that they organise around the rights of working people at the point at which they work, and campaign more widely for rights which influence society more generally.
If trades unions keep a low profile, or work in ways which do not press the interests of their members too hard, then the media has been able to accommodate them – tolerate, and even praise them. But this has not been the case when there have been major industrial disputes.
At the end of the nineteenth century and in the first decades of the twentieth, the trades unions had to deal with a developing mass circulation press, which as the 1900s gave way to the 1930s was owned by companies and people, critical and often downright hostile to the movement. In addition, as broadcasting rose to prominence in the 1920s and 30s, they were faced with a new, centralised, organisation, the BBC, which showed little sympathy for them.
In December 1910 the printers' union, the London Society of Compositors(LSC), became engaged in an industrial struggle to establish a 48-hour week and started a daily strike bulletin called The World. From 25 January 1911 it was renamed the Daily Herald. The ownership of the paper passed to the Trades Union Congress in 1922. From 1922-1930 it was the official paper of the TUC and then, in 193O a 51% share was sold to Odhams, publishers of the People. It was the voice of the Labour and Trade Union movement. By the 1960s with readership in decline, it was repackaged as 'The Sun' and in 1969 was bought by Rupert Murdoch. Along with the Daily Worker, and to some extent the Daily Mirror after 1930, the Daily Herald provided a voice for the concerns of the movement in the mid-twentieth century – and it reached a mass circulation. And the movement needed that voice.
The mass circulation 'national' press in the UK was routinely critical of the trades unions. In the 1920s through to the 1950s and 60s the big owners, though willing to deal with trades unions in their midst, were highly critical of the movement.
In 1947, in 1960 and again in 1974, successive governments established Royal Commissions on the press to deal, in part, with the economic issues but also because trades unions were concerned about bias and misrepresentation in the media. Indeed the 1947 Commission was established in part because the National Union of Journalists was so concerned about the threat that concentrated ownership posed to freedom of expression and standards.
The Labour movement was pivotal in pressing, often via the NUJ, for reforms in the way the press regulated standards, and was involved in successive attempts in the post-war period to establish workable systems of governance in the industry and redress for people maltreated by papers.
For example, in 1971 problems of bias in the press prompted the TUC to set up its own project monitoring the content of papers. Later in that decade, both the Labour Party and the Trades Union Congress told the Royal Commission on the Press that 'the coverage of industrial relations was biased and inadequate'.
Broadcasting was also a problem. Set up in 1922, the BBC rapidly became a power in the land, with the capacity to reach everyone with a radio set. The news to the BBC was supplied, up to the outbreak of World War II by the newspaper industry and so it contained an in built bias against the trades unions. In 1923 the Daily Herald complained that the political bulletins on the BBC covered the Conservatives and Liberals, but not Labour. During the General Strike of 1926, the BBC kept the leader of the Labour Party off the air.
In 1932 Walter Citrine, the General Secretary of the TUC pointed out that a BBC broadcast surveying the year of the General Strike simply did not present the trades unions argument. So, throughout the 1930s the Trades Union movement kept pressing the BBC to allow the voice of the movement to be heard on the issues of the day – but made very little headway.
For example, in 1935 the joint TUC and Labour Party, National Council of Labour, pressed for the BBC Board of Governors to be drawn from 'a wider social sphere' than the 'well-to-do classes' from which they were habitually chosen.
Although this changed during World War II – 1939 – 1945, when the Unions were drawn into the national war effort, the trades union movement continued to challenge the broadcasting establishment.
In 1949 and again in 1962 and 1974, when government enquiries into Broadcasting sat, the TUC pressed the case for more representation of working class people on the staff of the Corporation, for better representation of the trade union viewpoint and for more democratic structures of broadcasting.
There were high profile clashes which exemplified the ongoing problem the trades union movement had with the press.
During the 1970s and 1980s the mainstream national press shifted sharply to the right and the result was both a barrage of attacks on individual trades unions, and the steady drip, drip of a view of the world which privileged individual enrichment and anti- collectivism. Health workers, local government workers, steel workers, civil servants, car workers all felt the lash of press and television misrepresentation.
But perhaps the most shameful incident in the history of relationship between the media and the trades unions was during the 1984-85 Coal Dispute. As Seamus Milne has pointed out in his book, 'The Enemy Within' – the assault on the miners was a carefully planned campaign to weaken the most powerful union in the country, using every device available to the government, including contacts between the media and the security services. The media were in general swayed by the government's perspective on the strike, not giving credence to the NUM's assertion that the government had a plan to decimate the industry. It represented the strike as a struggle between the violent, undemocratic NUM and a public spirited government and a neutral police force; none of this was true.
Even the Labour Party, under Neil Kinnock – who was no friend of the leadership of the NUM - produced a report on the media coverage of the strike considered the reporting of the dispute unbalanced, and the Campaign For Press and Broadcasting Freedom argued that BBC and ITV had 'marginalised and ridiculed' the miners' case on radio and television 'not by propaganda and lies as in Fleet Street's coverage' but by the insidious and almost imperceptible daily repetition of the entire terms of reference of the dispute as seen by the NCB'
This is just one of the most high profile incidents. But since the mid-1970s work by the Glasgow Media Group has shown time and time again how broadcasting routinely gives preference to interpretations of the economic and policy landscape which favours the interpretations of government and employers over that of the workforce, and in particular of their representatives.
There are principled journalists working across the media, who still manage to produce first class work on industrial relations. But, the lack of interest in the perspectives of trade unionists in the last two decades has been echoed in the decline of the numbers of industrial correspondents in the press and broadcasting.
Historically, then, the trades union movement has had to contend with a media which, because of the ways it is owned and controlled is geared towards marginalising and, or, attacking organised labour.
How do you tackle this problem? Well that is what the other speakers will address and which we can discuss. But I think history points in certain ways.
Firstly the movement and individual unions cannot view the media as neutral. They have proven not to be.
Secondly, the movement has to take its own publicity and outreach very seriously; not just internal communications but also outreach. This has been how things have been developing in the last thirty years, but I would argue there is still a long way to go.
Thirdly, neither awareness of the structural bias in the industry, nor clever public relations will solve the problem. Ever since the dawn of the 20th century, trade unionists have been trying to think of ways to change the media. They have set up their own papers, they have established inquiries into media coverage, and they have written reports designed to influence government policy. They have founded and supported organisations like the CPBF, which was formed in 1979, to tackle these kinds of problems.
Things can change. The work that the CPBF and others did on racism and sexism in the media has borne fruit in the ways in which reporting has developed and past practices are now seen as unacceptable. The work it did pressing for a right of reply to inaccuracies, influenced the ways in which the media dealt with these issues, and underpinned the perspective developed by Leveson.
The NUJ and BECTU have had success over the years, working with a range of organisations, to ameliorate some of the sharpest attacks on public service broadcasting. But nobody can claim that there has been a radical transformation of the balance of power in the media. To do this all unions, in all sectors, have to work together to formulate communications policies that are coherent and workable and which can gain widespread popular support as well influence in mainstream politics. I also think that all unions should, even in these economically exacting times, support campaigning organisations such as the CPBF
History therefore tells us that we should work together to challenge the structural biases in the media, and seek a much more inclusive, open and accountable. In so doing, we will be building on the thoughts and struggles of women and men in the movement, who for the last 100 years have been forced by necessity to confront and challenge the media, and work for something better.
DATELINE: 31 May, 2014
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