COVID-19 Pandemic Has Drastically Worsened Worker Protections for America’s Journalists

by Andy Carr (guest blogger)

Vintage newspaper ads from mid 20th century newspaper
Vintage advertisements in a mid-20th century newspaper. While advertising revenue remains essential to both digital and print media, revenues have only plunged further amid COVID-19. Source: AnnaliseArt, Pixabay.

Throughout the past three decades, newspapers, magazines and online sources of news and analysis have faced deepening challenges. As I explained in a blog post last year, “the labor crisis in journalism [is] a human rights concern unto itself.” In particular, consolidation of media outlets into fewer holding companies restrains the “viewpoint diversity” in coverage, an essential quality for citizens of democratic societies to stay informed and to hold leaders to account.

Just over a year later, these concerns have only escalated with the twin public health and economic crises brought on by the novel coronavirus pandemic.

The Poynter Institute has maintained a regularly updated list of all closures, pay cuts, furloughs, layoffs and other employment changes at American outlets, here. One cumulative figure for media-sector impacts? Over 36,000 to date in 2020, according to the New York Times.

Granted, media and journalism job losses are a small fraction of total job losses. According to another New York Times report on unemployment claims since the start of the pandemic, estimated at 36 million jobs vanished throughout the United States through mid-May; by May 21, NPR added in an update, the total climbed to 38.6 million unemployed, with America’s poorer families and minority communities facing job loss rates double the national average.

Because of the advertising revenue-based funding model for most media organizations today, however, proportional financial losses in the field have been extreme, far offsetting increased readership and subscription rates. At Boston Globe Media—publisher of the storied daily paper, The Boston Globe—subscriptions surged by more than a third between March and May, but ads plunged by 30%, according to Digiday. Per CNBC, meanwhile, the New York Times might see ad revenue drop by a staggering 50 percent in the second quarter of 2020.

The same pattern is everywhere, from global conglomerates like Disney and major city papers like the Dallas Morning News to countless smaller, local outlets nationwide. At the extremes are cases like Cleveland’s 178-year-old daily, The Plain-Dealer, which cut almost its entire unionized staff by April 2020, leaving only some “60 to 65 journalists” at Cleveland.com, “a sister non-union company,” reports Poynter.

A subject covered less comprehensively amid drastic shifts is the combined effect of remote work, lockdowns and mass layoffs on labor organizing and activism—to say nothing of daily individual hardships—throughout this industry. In brief, it’s been a bloodbath. VICE Media offers an instructive example.

In mid-April, the Wall Street Journal initially reported that some “300 Vice employees in its digital operations unit” were set to be laid off, per an internal document obtained by the Journal. In response, as The Hill reported, Vice pushed back, claiming “that the plan [had] not been ‘vetted or endorsed’ by Vice Media Group and that no decisions at the company [had] been made.” Just a few weeks later, VICE ultimately went ahead with layoffs, though fewer than the Journal had suggested: cutting 155 workers as of May 15, on top of roughly 250 just a year earlier.

CNBC’s accounting of VICE’s latest cuts noted that the latter company’s CEO Nancy Dubuc blamed “not only…coronavirus, but [also] Big Tech companies taking the lion’s share of digital advertising growth.” Dubuc’s comment is an understatement: As of 2019, just three firms—Google, Facebook and Amazon—collected “68.1% of all digital ad spending,” including 69% of mobile ads.

At the same time, the extraordinary financial stratification of digital media companies has not gone unnoticed. Kim Kelly, a freelance journalist who has been published in Teen Vogue and contributed to The New Republic and others, in addition to VICE, said on Twitter that this “annual bloodletting ritual” left her “sad and furious.”

Kelly pointed to Dubuc as one example of many sky-high “executive salaries,” despite the precarity of rank-and-file journalists: While Dubuc’s VICE CEO salary has not been published, the New York Post in 2016 published details about her sale of a 4,200-square-foot Upper West Side townhouse for $9.4 million.

It’s part of an indelible pattern at media firms. Poynter noted early last year that even companies with “revenues down, posting a loss and stock price sliding” still pay out millions in top-level corporate compensation – more than “$5.2 million for [Gannett’s] Bob Dickey and [$2.8 million] for Craig Forman at McClatchy.” Coronavirus-related layoffs at McClatchy have hit roughly 4.4% of all staff; Gannett has laid off an unknown number of workers at its 261 newspapers throughout the country, though dozens of smaller-scale losses have been reported individually.

(As a structural concern, these patterns map onto the trajectory of TV broadcasters a generation ago. As Halliwell and Morley explained in American Thought and Culture in the 21st Century, deregulatory actions from the 1980s through the 1996 Communications Act “loosened restrictions on station ownership [and] allowed media conglomerates…to amass greater numbers of [TV] and radio stations” (p. 278). Many of the same conglomerates own significant stakes in digital and print media firms today, replicating their TV models at newspapers and magazines.)

Back at VICE, the company’s WGAE-represented union was blindsided by the cuts, condemning the company’s leaders for “repeatedly failing to discuss workshare programs…used to avoid layoffs” at other outlets, according to a union statement posted on Twitter. Moreover, the statement continued, VICE “did not agree to make further cuts to executive compensation” to avoid layoffs “in the middle of a global pandemic.”

Between the more than 30 million unemployment claims and tens of thousands of media-sector layoffs since the start of the pandemic, though, a large number of freelance workers have been excluded from most tallies. Especially in media, where delays in paychecks and low “kill fees” for scrubbed articles routinely put freelancers in a bind, the data are undercounting and effectively excluding many who already struggled.

As early as mid-March, long before many major cities followed New York and Seattle into lockdowns, freelancers saw their lined-up interviews, previously accepted pitches, speaking engagements and editing opportunities suddenly canceled.

Taylor Crumpton, an Oakland-based freelance cultural journalist who has written for Paper Magazine, Pitchfork and many other outlets, was one of few to give a precise dollar amount: $2,000 in lost commissions through March 2020. As Crumpton explained further to Girls United, an Essence Magazine project providing mentoring and community for young Black women in digital spaces, simultaneously working as a social worker on the “front line…with homeless youth” was simply “frightening.”

She added: “The disheartening part of this is witnessing my counterparts lose 50–80% of their yearly income, so I’ve been uplifting their links to purchase products, or donate to PayPal, CashApp, and Venmo. Because of this pandemic, I lost a cover story with an artist who I’ve been working towards interviewing for years.”

Through early May, Crumpton added in a Twitter update, other opportunities evaporated, from co-hosting a podcast to multiple staff writer positions.

As Crumpton and others have pointed out as well, the disproportionate effects of COVID-19 on racial and ethnic minority groups in CDC data and in employment figures appear to be reflected in media-layoff patterns. Bianca Gracie, who left Billboard in April, frankly summarized the layoffs in her network on Twitter: “Woman, woman, Black person, woman, Latinx person, Black person, woman, another POC, Black person, Latinx person…the pattern is either coincidental or deliberate.”

Crumpton, Gracie, and their colleagues’ experiences speak to society’s digital superstructure, especially amid a global pandemic that precludes most in-person interaction. As E. Gabriella Coleman explained a decade ago in her survey of digital media ethnographies, the totality of our “digital age remains a powerful structuring emblem with material and cultural consequences” (490), including both its capacity to give voice to or further “marginalize groups,” in academia and in practice.

In other words—just like the wrenching, cyclical losses across America’s broader economy—the social, economic, and other costs of media’s implosion are not evenly distributed, but are weighted heavily against those already long excluded.

Black and white photo of the New York Times newsroom in 1942, Men in suits sit behind desks
The New York Times newsroom ca. 1942. Source: janeb13, Pixabay

But what are the implications of these far-reaching changes for organizing efforts in media? And what particular, heightened challenges do they pose, especially now?

At unionized outlets, bargaining with executives over protections for fired, furloughed or otherwise affected workers continues. Both the BuzzFeed News and VICE Media unions, for example, have been engaged in discussions, while Wired, part of Conde Nast’s portfolio of outlets, is seeking union recognition. All three, among many others, have centered robust severance packages in their demands – vital financial safeguards for suddenly unemployed former colleagues, often living in some of the nation’s most-expensive cities.

At BuzzFeed News, the union’s overriding goal has been making any crisis-response decisions collectively and, most importantly, preventing any job losses, union members or not. One potential model for distributing costs while preserving employment sought by the BuzzFeed News Union is the modified “Work Sharing Program” at the recently recognized Los Angeles Times’ own newsroom guild. The Program, adopted at the start of May, implemented across-the-board pay cuts and hour reductions, but with a minimum 12-week ban on layoffs.

Crucially, the Program—whose name derives from the “Work Sharing Program” under California Unemployment Insurance laws, established in 1978—“allows eligible employees to receive unemployment benefits” while working reduced hours, subject to state approval. Although the Program’s legal requirements and applicability restrictions are extensive, it helps fill income gaps for individual workers while allowing the company to absorb lost advertising revenue.

Though union-led efforts are in flux, they offer some promise to their members and other workers at those outlets. For others working at non-union outlets and for freelancers, in particular, the challenges are even greater.

Some media freelancers may have access to membership in the IWW Freelance Journalists Union, from “journalists, writers, [and] editors” to “researchers, programmers and printers.” But IWW-FJU’s New York City membership criteria, for example, are limited to current industry workers. For those already laid off or who have worked more than a month in other sectors to make ends meet, may be ineligible to join, or, if they are already a member, “must transfer” their union membership, where possible.

Regardless of union affiliations or publishing platforms, freelancers face compounded frustrations that are all-too-familiar, but worse than before. These include challenged or reneged invoices, late payments, slashed budgets, and the logistical difficulties of simply doing their jobs—when they can—entirely remotely, without any meaningful separation from their commitments to family or roommates at home.

Nor are billionaire philanthropists and “impact” investors, like the high-profile owners of the Washington Post or L.A. Times, likely to save the day. Another billionaire-backed publication, the Atlantic, was reported to be joining the vast ranks of hobbled legacy media outlets. In total, 20% of all staff are being laid off at the magazine.

It would almost seem remarkable—except for its familiarity—that just last year, billionaire Laurene Powell Jobs, “the California-based widow of Apple founder Steve Jobs,” further consolidated financial ownership and control of the magazine through Emerson Collective, an “impact investing” LLC founded by Powell Jobs, POLITICO reported at the time. Powell Jobs herself wrote in the Atlantic about the values of journalism—a lifeblood of democracy—as well, aligning herself with journalists’ “struggle for the soul of this nation,” the “side of those who are fighting for the truth.” (Forbes estimates current Powell Jobs’ net worth is $19.5 billion.)

What’s left for solutions? Crowdfunding, like any number of fundraisers for furloughed and freelance workers or for state-specific media sectors, is heartening proof of media camaraderie and commitments to mutual support, but a limited source of relief given the extremity of losses.

For similar reasons, expanding subscription-based funding is unavailing at best in times of Great Depression-level unemployment – such individualized, voluntary forms of support simply lack necessary scale. Such “subscription-powered” media have been extended with some success to individual journalists and writers through newsletter-styled Substack, on Patreon, or other platforms. Unfortunately, as Forbes magazine recently explained, subscriber models, whether for media outlets or solo writers, “need a lot of name recognition” to work.

Given the enormous losses accelerated by the pandemic and less-than-promising options above, public efforts, coordinated and funded through the state, are likely necessary. This alternative is favored by the NewsGuild-CWA, America’s largest journalist union, which announced their Save The News initiative and related efforts “calling for federal, state, provincial, and local governments to provide public funds to sustain news operations.” As the NewsGuild explained, such efforts are “quite possibly the only way to ensure long-term viability for…news-gathering operations.”

Many individual outlets’ unions have signed on and Save The News has channeled petitions, letter campaigns, and social media support into generating public support and congressional action. In a promising sign, Congress seems to be heeding the call: multiple bills have been introduced to extend some forms of emergency assistance, especially for struggling local media.

Prospects for passing remain uncertain and, even if passed, myriad structural and financial challenges predating the pandemic will not be resolved. Much, much more will be necessary.

But there’s a start.

Monstrous Misrepresentation: Disabilities in the Horror Genre

Empty seats in a movie theater.
Movie Theater. Source: Matthew Berggren, Creative Commons

Far too often popular media, particularly horror movies, paint people with disabilities as monsters.  Scary movies are notorious for taking completely real health conditions and distorting them into what appears inevitably dangerous.  In some cases, they create villainous characters with physical appearances that are seen as abnormal based on real conditions that have physically visible symptoms, like acromegaly.  In others, they create characters based on real mental health conditions, like dissociative identity disorder, and depict them as if they have the powers and the thirst for evil of a comic book super-villain.  These dangerously inaccurate depictions of disabilities dehumanize entire groups of people in one fell swoop, often without any clear recognition from the creators of the damage they have done.  

Acromegaly in Gerald’s Game 

In Stephen King’s novel and film Gerald’s Game, Raymond Andrew Joubert is a grave robber, necrophiliac, and serial killer.  He is also a character with acromegaly, a disorder that occurs when too much growth hormone is produced due to benign tumors (adenomas) on the pituitary gland.  Acromegaly is associated with many serious health problems, such as type II diabetes, high blood pressure, an increased risk of cardiovascular disease, arthritis, and, if not treated, even death.  The most visible and easily recognized symptoms of the condition are unusual growth of hands and feet, a protruding brow bone and lower jaw, an enlarged nose, and teeth that have spaced out.  The condition does not make a person any more dangerous than any other.  It seems that King only chose to create this character with this condition because of the physical appearance that is associated with it.  This is a problem, because it perpetuates the common, preexisting belief that people who look different from what is deemed “normal” are dangerous and should be feared.   

With the right lighting and camera angles, anyone could look terrifying.  There is no reason to use people with real health conditions in a way that only makes life and society’s understanding of them more difficult. 

Dissociative Identity Disorder 

Dissociative identity disorder (DID) is one of many mental health conditions that has experienced significant harm due to failed representation in the media.  It is far too common to find that fictional media depictions of DID lack any presentation of the true facts of the disorder.  The Entropy System is a DID system who posts educational videos about DID on YouTube.  Their series on DID in the Media does a thorough job at analyzing the quality of different examples of representation of DID in films.  They use four main criteria in assessing each work.   

First, does it “communicate proper diagnosis and treatment”?  Many attempted depictions of DID fail to even name the disorder accurately and call it “Multiple Personality Disorder”, its name prior to 1994.  These works also often suggest that all systems (the collective term for one’s alters/identities) with DID are working towards the same goal with their treatment: to integrate all the identities into one.  Some systems are not interested in integrating.  The Entropy System points out in many of their videos that an important part of treatment, regardless of the system’s level of interest in integration, is establishing strong communication between the different alters. 

Second, does the work address the cause of DID?  The disorder is a result of repetitive, severe trauma that occurs during childhood. According to the theory of Structural Dissociation, no person is born with a fully integrated personality.  This means that, when we are children, we are made up of multiple individual personalities or “ego-states,” which integrate and become a single personality between the ages of six and nine.  Each of these ego-states is responsible for performing a different role.  DID occurs when trauma prevents these ego-states from integrating.  The ego-states develop into individual identities known as alters. 

Third, are the alters shown as part of a unit, or as extra bits for a central/main identity?  It is important to recognize that no single alter is more real or significant that any of the others.  They are all parts of the same whole. 

Fourth, is the character relatable?  Are all the alters well-rounded and realistic? 

DID in the Media 

One of the most common and most serious misconceptions that the horror genre frequently perpetuates about DID is the idea that there is such a thing as a “bad alter.”  Within a DID system, each alter has a role that it performs to help protect the person with DID.  One alter is responsible for day-to-day living, while another might be responsible for holding on to certain trauma memories that would make day to day living extremely difficult.  One alter, called a persecutor, may mimic abusers or other people who have caused trauma to the system in an attempt to keep the system from re-experiencing the abuse.  When horror movies depict a person with DID as being dangerous to others, they typically do so with a severe misrepresentation of what persecutor-alters are and what they do.  The vast-majority of the time, if persecutors cause harm, it is towards the person with DID themselves and not other people.  DissociaDID, another system that posts education videos about DID on YouTube, has a video that is helpful in understanding alter roles, persecutors, and how they function within a DID system. 

Films like Split and Glass are extremely harmful to the DID community, because they glamorize the idea of a “bad alter” and depict people with DID as being villains or monsters, which is far from the truth.  These two movies involve a character with DID named Kevin Wendell Crumb, who has a bad alter named “The Beast” that has super-human abilities and wants to get rid of the “impure” people of the world.  In Split, the other alters in the system kidnap girls and watch over them until The Beast comes out.  To say that DID is depicted in an unrealistic way is quite an understatement. 

For many people in the general population, their only exposure to disorders such as DID is through the media.  When so much of the representation is riddled with harmful, fear-inducing inaccuracies, people who see that representation start to view people with those disorders in real life as being inherently dangerous or violent.  This is why quality and accurate representation is so important. 

The symbol for handicap parking in yellow paint on black pavement.
handicapped zone parking spot symbol on asphalt New Zealand. Source: Mr. Thinktank, Creative Commons

The Connection to Human Rights 

As we continue to push for more representation in popular media for marginalized communities, we must also make sure that that representation is accurate and not harmful to those communities.  When horror movies use people with disabilities in their attempts to scare their audience, they create/reinforce a belief that people with these disabilities in the real world are dangerous and scary.  This is a human rights issue, because prejudice, discrimination, and violence are fueled by fear.  Fear impacts who parents will let their children play with, and how children treat their classmates. This can interfere with one’s access to their right to an education, which is established in Article 26 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR). Fear affects how we interact with people we pass by on the street and people’s willingness to help find ways to improve people’s life experiences.  This can impede one’s access to their right to be an active part of their community (Article 27) and their right to seek employment and have favorable working conditions (Article 23). 

Non-disabled people need to use the privilege they have to advocate for those without it, and a person is less likely to want to advocate for someone who they are afraid of.  In order to have the basic human rights of all people fulfilled, we need to all be able to look at each other as members of humanity, and fear, especially unjustified fear, inhibits that. 

Conclusion 

I’m not going to lie or try to pretend that I have never let these kinds of portrayals of people with disabilities change the way I look at them.  Thankfully, I know better now, but there are still moments where I catch myself briefly slipping back into old ways of thinking.  It is important that we as consumers of media recognize the harm that these failed representations of an already marginalized group have caused and that we do our best to avoid supporting them monetarily.  We need to increase awareness of this harm, in hopes that, one day, the horror genre will no longer be made up of so many destructive stereotypes.   

Rather than the same stereotypically use of people with disabilities as the antagonists in film, why not increase their representations as protagonists?  Imagine, a horror movie where the protagonist is a person with DID, whose alters all work together to survive while also dealing with the memory loss that often comes with the switching of identities.  The film A Quiet Place is a brilliant example of positive and constructive disability representation.  One of the main characters is a young deaf girl, and her disability ends up saving her family.  In a world where making noise is a deadly act, their knowledge of sign language allowed them to communicate without risking their lives.  This is in complete opposition of the stereotypical idea that people with disabilities are burdensome for their loved one.  The makers of the film clearly did their research and were able to help spark important conversations about disability representation. 

The Unprecedented 2016 Presidential Election Event Recap

Photo of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in front of American flag
Trump vs. Clinton. Source: Galya Gubchenko. Creative Commons.

On Thursday, November 9, one year after the 2016 presidential election, the UAB Institute for Human Rights co-sponsored the event, “The Unprecedented 2016 Presidential Election,” at the Edge of Chaos located in UAB’s Lister Hill Library. Other sponsors of the event were UAB’s Department of Government and the Edge of Chaos.

The event featured special guest, Dr. Rachel Bitecofer, the Assistant Director of the Wason Center for Public Policy, a professor at Christopher Newport University, and an academic pollster. The event was on her new book, which has the same title: The Unprecedented 2016 Presidential Election.

Large amounts of data are presented in Bitecofer’s book. She states it “brings an empirical, political science approach that answers the question of why Hillary Clinton lost the 2016 presidential election, and it focuses on the strategical elements that campaigns are going through because the public is not really aware of what they see in campaign politics.”

 

Dr. Rachel Bitecofer standing in the Edge of Chaos at UAB
Dr. Rachel Bitecofer kicking off her lecture. Source: Dr. Tina Kempin Reuter

Bitecofer began by announcing that her approach to looking at the election results is holistic and systematic, and argues that the entire campaign was framed by an electoral strategy, meaning that there were two problems the candidates faced: reaching out to moderates and independents to vote one way rather than the other and then to get the partisan voters to show up. “If they show up, they’re a guaranteed voted,” Bitecofer said, “but that is a big if.”

The lecture was broken down into chapters. The first was titled: “Pitchforks and Torches.” This was when Bitecofer “put the 2016 election into context,” and looked at the patterns that put Donald Trump in the White House. She examined patriarchal behaviors that were prevalent in the 1950s and 60s that still persist today. She examined the effect of the media’s influence and how the US entered an era of polarization; the media has opened “partisan vacuums,” which are areas where it is possible to only get news from a partisan source like Breitbart or HuffPost.

In the next chapter of the lecture, “Making of the Media Event,” Bitecofer showed how Trump dominated the media until snagging the GOP nomination. Bitecofer’s research was presented with graphs that showed how Trump’s popularity in the news peaked when he did things like “picking a fight with the Pope on Twitter,” or “saying he wanted to ban all Muslims from the country.” Bitecofer then showed that even while Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders were battling it out for the Democrat Nomination, the news continued to focus more on Donald Trump. She said that this came from Donald Trump’s knowledge of “how to capitalize on both his celebrity and the media’s thirst for scandal.” The Trump campaign ran a base-centered campaign. They appealed to the base voters, a voter who votes for the party rather than the candidate, rather than the establishment.

Bitecofer debunked the myth that “if the Clinton campaign had done ‘x, y, or z’ they would have been more successful,” by saying that, using the metrics one usually does to measure campaign success, they ran an almost perfect campaign. The Clinton campaigned out-fundraised the Trump campaign and the Clinton campaigned got the SuperPACs, which is unusual for a Democrat’s campaign. Despite the almost perfect campaign, there were mistakes. The Clinton campaign made the mistake of hiding the fact that Hillary had pneumonia, and during the debate when she was sick, she made the claim about “deplorables.” Bitecofer said this was a mistake as Clinton has always had so much control over her emotions and demeanor that this came as a shock to many people because “she let that control down.”

Continuing the observation of the media, Bitecofer presented the evidence of news sources’ endorsements of Hillary Clinton. All but two major news sources endorsed Clinton, which was unlike any election in history. Usually, according to Bitecofer, there are sources that only endorse Democrats, and some that only endorse Republicans. Some who never endorsed a Democrat before endorsed Clinton. Not only was this strange but, “not even sitting Republicans endorsed Donald Trump until after the Iowa caucus. No one in the party wanted him,” Bitecofer asserted.

Third-party voting, referred to as “defecting” in presidential elections, was a large issue in this election; defection rates were higher than any in modern history – higher than the 2000 elections. “In Wisconsin, for example, a state that Clinton lost by 1%, the defection rate for third party candidates is normally about 1.5%. [It was] 6.32% in 2016,” Bitecofer found. “The problem is that all of the defectors who wrote in Bernie Sanders’ name or voted for Jill Stein because they just could not bear to vote for Hillary Clinton, cost her the election. I am not saying it is their fault, but I am saying that the campaign that they ran did nothing to prevent it.” She also found that defection only mattered in Hillary versus Bernie. There was almost no defection from Republicans to a third-party candidate. “Democrats fall in love; Republicans fall in line.”

Bitecofer then told of an experiment that she conducted. She went to the adamant Bernie supporters and asked, “What if instead of Tim Kaine, Hillary Clinton brought on Elizabeth Warren as her Vice President candidate? Would you have voted for her then?” This tactic suggested Hillary empowered the more progressive Democrats and attempted to bring in those who were in the #BernieorBust movement. About half of them said it would have made them more likely to vote for Clinton. From this experiment, Bitecofer concluded that had the Clinton campaign ran a base-focused campaign like the Republicans had, “we would likely have the first female president sitting in office now.”

Ultimately, it was concluded that “Clinton ran the perfect strategy for the wrong electoral campaign in an extremely polarized era. In such an era, it is all about firing up your base; you better give them candidates that get them ‘up’!”

The UAB Institute for Human Rights is proud to have such knowledgeable lecturers for our events and programs. For a list of our upcoming events, please visit our events page.