Euphemisms and Broad Brushes in Campaign CoverageIt has become a media routine: While covering the presidential campaign, reporters and pundits use the term "blue collar" as a description of workers who are white. Kind of weird, don't you think? My dictionary offers this definition of "blue collar" as an adjective: "Of or relating to wage earners, especially as a class, whose tasks are carried out in work clothes and usually involve manual labor." Are political journalists so enclosed in a self-recycling bubble that they haven't noticed how many Americans who actually fit the "blue collar" description are African American, Latino or Asian? I doubt it. The chances are — if they return a rental car, see maids at a hotel or go through a supermarket checkout line — journalists are at least dimly aware that racial minorities are often a majority of those in uniforms who do manual labor. And a visit to a factory almost anywhere in the country is apt to dispel a stereotype of factory workers as white. But it's too easy to report in terms of hazy categories — and, evidently, too simple to resist when so many other journalists are engaged in painting the nation's population with a similarly broad brush. I suspect that one thing happening here is a preference for non-racial language that sort of conveys a racial category without quite coming out with one. So, "blue collar" is sometimes serving as a euphemism for white. And an inaccurate one. This is odd in part because, day to day and year to year, economic class divisions are hardly a favorite topic of the national press corps. Yes, there's plenty of discourse about economic distress. But that distress is not commonly framed in terms of class conflict, much less class struggle. In fact, political reporters and media commentaries have often responded negatively to politicians who call for lower-income Americans to challenge the existing prerogatives of wealthy individuals and large corporations. Media critiques of John Edwards last winter included the accusation that he had become too "angry" on economic issues since his sunny persona as a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination in 2004.
Overall, in contrast to the class-oriented lines of attack that came from Edwards during his latest presidential bid, the less combative approach of Barack Obama was more warmly received by media outlets during the long primary season. (Full disclosure: I was recently elected as an Obama delegate to the Democratic National Convention.) My point here is not to assert that anger is appropriate or inappropriate from lower-income people toward concentrations of wealth and capital. What has struck me in recent weeks is that news accounts are focusing on the "blue collar" category in such an inaccurate way — seeming to address economic class without doing so in a straightforward way. The result is a kind of now-you-see-it-now-you-don't approach to economic class division. This is consistent with the zigzag evasions of U.S. news media that routinely bypass issues of economic class — while occasionally treating us to drawn-out discourses on the "blue collar" vote without noting that blue-collar workers exist in abundance within all racial categories. Ironically, while seeming to draw attention to class distinctions, the current media focus on "blue collar" workers as a category of voters has an effect of blurring very real ways that economic class disparities are sharply dividing Americans in the real world. Perhaps if more "blue collar" workers could be found writing news articles and providing media commentaries, we'd get less blurriness and more clarity. Norman Solomon's books include "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death." A documentary film of the same name, based on the book, was released this spring on home video. COPYRIGHT 2008 DISTRIBUTED BY CREATORS SYNDICATE, INC.
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