The Invisible Poor

Not least for the benefit of my several readers in Egypt at this very moment, John writes:

The excitement in the West over the protests in Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, and elsewhere in the Middle East has been a revealing exercise in vicarious democracy. As with the 2009-2010 election protests in Iran, many Westerners have come forward with an outpouring of sympathy and support for those who took to the streets. Again, as with the Iranian protests, large amounts of real and digital ink has been spent writing about how the burgeoning revolutions in the Middle East are fueled by social networking websites such as Facebook and Twitter.

While I do not deny the importance of social media in helping to connect and organize some people, the huge role played by labor unions in countries such as Egypt and Tunisia has largely been ignored by much of the media. The major reason for this state of affairs is the anti-labor bias of much of the media establishment. While one could go on and on about corporate media magnates and their right-wing agendas, I do not believe that the major problem is on the Right. Indeed, the denizens of Fox News and other right-wing media outlets have largely been focused on Islamism and what organizations such as the Muslim Brotherhood mean for the interests of the U.S. and Israel if they manage to get a taste of official power.

Instead, I posit that the real culprits behind the media silence on the role of unions in the recent protests in the Middle East have been the well-educated, white-collar progressives who often dominate the staffs of newspapers and other media outlets. To the progressive professionals who work in the media industry, the story that revolutions are being made by well-educated young people Twittering or messaging each other on Facebook is a very attractive narrative. It validates the netroots narrative of the Obama campaign which claims that real political change can happen through the click of a mouse.

Additionally, I do believe that there is a class bias against unions and working-class people among progressive professionals which has helped to bury the stories of labor activism in the Middle East. For many progressive professionals, labor unions are dinosaurs from an age before globalization and the Internet. Even worse, they are often made up of seemingly unattractive people who work in dirty jobs and probably hold conservative social views, especially in developing countries. Worse yet, they might even be religious! For the progressive professional journalist, it is much better to focus on attractive, tech-savvy students, as they did in Iran, while ignoring the other sectors of the population. In the Iranian case, this led to a refusal to accept Ahmadinejad’s victory, which was secured by the votes of the poorer sections of Iranian society, precisely the people ignored by the Western media.

Despite the important differences between the protests in Iran and the more recent protests in Egypt and other Middle Eastern countries, one major lesson can be learned from all of them: the Western media is increasingly hell-bent on ignoring the poor and working-class, especially when they engage in independent political action. At best, the poor are depicted as unfortunate people in need of charity. While this is an admirable sentiment, it avoids the issue of social justice, and as we know, charity is not a substitute for justice. Furthermore, this trend in media reporting reflects not only the increased corporate domination of the media, but also the transformation of the “Left” in much of the West from a vehicle for the economic interests of workers to an almost completely elitist movement concerned with advancing causes that many working-class people do not care about or are actively opposed to. A Left without workers is not any kind of Left at all.