Fake populism. Two articles in today's Times deal with working-class issues. Below, the news peg in both instances: see if you can guess which story gets A1 play, and which is buried on A13.

Over decades of wars and death and grieving and regret, the gratuity [a one-time payment for death in the line of duty] has remained one of the military's unbending traditions. It may be less majestic and moving than taps and crisply folded flags, perhaps, but it is no less a part of the rituals and routines surrounding a soldier's death.

As the war in Iraq grinds on, a dozen or so death gratuity checks are handed out across the country in a typical week. Some families say $12,000 is not enough, even though it is double what the military paid from 1991 until Congress approved an increase in 2003, and even though soldiers now automatically have life insurance.

In Congress, there are [bipartisan] proposals to raise the gratuity again.

James Barron, "For Families of Fallen Soldiers, the 2nd Knock Brings $12,000"

For the first time, Human Rights Watch has issued a report that harshly criticizes a single industry in the United States, concluding that working conditions among the nation's meatpackers and slaughterhouses are so bad that they violate basic human rights. ...It finds that jobs in many beef, pork and poultry plants are sufficiently dangerous to breach international agreements promising a safe workplace. ...

[The report] describes plants where exhausted employees slice into carcasses at a frenzied pace hour after hour, often suffering injuries from a slip of the knife or from repeating a single motion more than 10,000 times a day. It tells of workers' being asphyxiated by fumes from decaying matter, of legs cut off, of hands crushed.

Steven Greenhouse, "Rights Group Condemns Meatpackers on Job Safety"

Do you even need me to tell you the answer?

James Barron dully, dutifully makes the rounds of a few New York-area families who have been delivered the death gratuity recently, throws in some potted history, quotes a little political grandstanding, and calls it a day. Maybe having to shlep between Gloucester City, NJ and White Plains took it out of him—certainly when it comes to the writing he seems to have expended only the minimum of energy. But it's enough for A1.

Meanwhile, actual news—of workplace safety violations so systematic and severe, and government watchdogs so toothless, that it was necessary to bring the violations to the attention of the international community as human rights abuses—well, that gets stuffed as far into the hole as the editors can decently manage.

I bring this up because it illustrates as sharply as possible the NYT's way with the working classes. Every so often, A1 features a "populist" story like Barron's: and always to retail a soft populism, opportunistic, one focused on the military or on comfortably distant red-staters, preferably rural. These are stories that are essentially there to flatter the reader's capacity for empathy—and they solicit nothing else, no outrage, no real solidarity. The working-class people in them are sentimental props, at best objects of charity, not fellow citizens whose problems might demand a political response. A1 will take on the easy targets—a set of articles in the last year on unscrupulous insurance providers preying on soldiers about to deploy to Iraq comes to mind—but when do you ever see the Times giving real attention to the plight of laborers where the economic interests opposing them are powerful and politically well-armored?

posted by michael  10:28:42 PM  
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