It is not at all surprising that the union workers and their leaders are not receiving serious coverage on the Sunday talk shows. It must be remembered that most of the network stations are owned by interests that are not only in broadcasting but in other businesses that benefit from the destruction of employee unions.
This is only the tip of the iceberg. There are stories of mass protest in the United Kingdom due to the draconian cuts instituted by David Cameron, their new conservative prime minister. These stories went virtually unreported in the United States. It was shown that just collecting taxes from the wealthy in the country that are either delinquent or using tax loopholes to avoid taxes would mitigate the draconian cuts.
In the United States taxing capital gains and raising taxes on the wealthy slightly would mitigate our financial woes without affecting the already strapped middle class. There is no reason why the working man should have a higher marginal tax rate that a passive investor.
I am sure the corporations are terrified that if an eloquent union leader is able to distill the right points about what is effectively class warfare by the wealthy on the middle class, a movement may just spread, the catalyst partly being the Sunday news program.
Many in the middle east are saying enough. Many in the United States are not use to saying enough because our past standard of living was enough for us to be comfortable. As the plutocrats hunger for ever increasing returns they will continue to push the envelope till a cataclysmic shift in middle class thinking occurs. I would hope that saner politicians would slowly make things right to prevent what is ultimately a potential middle class revolt when they realize they have nothing to lose.
The main stream media, corporations, and the majority of politicians are in an unholy alliance where the middle class is nothing but their pawns. There are however more pawns than the sum total of them.
My Book: As I See It: Class Warfare The Only Resort To Right Wing Doom
Book’s Webpage: http://amzn.to/dt72c7 – Twitter: http://twitter.com/egbertowillies
Unions: Sunday Shows Are Shutting Us Out
WASHINGTON — Though thousands of Americans have turned out this week to show solidarity with Wisconsin’s public employees and oppose a threat to their collective bargaining rights, union officials say they have not been able to place a labor voice on this Sunday’s editions of the weekly public-affairs TV shows. The shows’ producers, they complain, are shutting out the workers’ perspective.
A union official told The Huffington Post that when none of the Sunday shows’ producers reached out to them to book a labor representative this week, several unions started to pitch the shows with affected workers and local and national leaders who they felt could discuss the protests. The official said the response from the shows was essentially "thanks, but no thanks."
"If you’re a Sunday show and there are labor fights going on for two weeks, if you can just book … Chris Christie, why would you actually go out and get somebody who is actually involved in this? That would be work!" snarked the official, adding, "Everybody’s been pushing, and everybody’s been shut down."
The Huffington Post reached out to producers at Fox News, NBC, ABC, CNN and CBS. NBC News spokesperson Erika Masonhall said the lineup for this weekend’s "Meet the Press" will not be final until Friday and "will highlight a number of topics and include a variety of guests and opinions." An official at another network said their show’s guest roster had likewise not been set and a labor representative could still be included.
CBS’s "Face the Nation" will feature Christie, the Republican governor of New Jersey who has been waging a fierce battle with the state’s teachers union. (He has even accused the union of "using children like drug mules" in school elections.)
Christie is also a frequent media guest, and that presence appears to have helped make him a particular target of labor. On Twitter, the AFL-CIO’s political communications director, Eddie Vale, joked, "But, don’t worry, while no labor members or leaders on Sun shows, you get Chris Christie! He’s never on TV so should be new & interesting."
While no Sunday show featured any workers or labor officials last week, ABC’s Bob Woodruff did do an on-the-ground report from Madison, Wis., where he interviewed some workers who were protesting. That report has been criticized, however, for overplaying the role of the small group of Tea Party protesters who were also there. Mediaite’s Tommy Christopher called it "a stunning example of the mainstream media’s true bias, toward laziness and conflict."
