Outside the Box: Corporate Media, Globalization, and the UPS Strike

Students of the news will welcome Deepa Kumar’s analysis of coverage of the 1997 UPS strike. Media coverage of that strike was notable for its departure from standard narratives concerning labor-management disputes. Most often, strikes are framed as disruptive, inconvenient to the public, and harmful to the economy.While news reports about the UPS strike often reflected these pro-business sentiments, they also, at times, represented labor’s point of view. Kumar presents a comprehensive examination of why this coverage was anomalous. Kumar adopts a ‘‘domination/resistance’’ model of media power, following Gramsci’s notion of hegemony. Based on this model, she argues that the news media are contradictory institutions that most often uphold the status quo by an over-reliance on official sources, and by unreflectively reproducing a professional ideology congruent with values and beliefs of the country’s power structures. She takes liberal apologists of the news media to task for their easy acceptance of the marriage of capitalism and democracy, criticizes the Chomsky-Herman model of political economy of the media for its overemphasis on the engineering of consent, and skewers postmodernist versions of cultural studies for their valorization of textual reading as resistance. Kumar maintains that, for the last third of the twentieth century, neoliberal strategies of globalization have given rise to a whole series of working class issues that were not unique to UPS: part-time employment, stagnant wages, subcontracting, speedups, diminished safety and health protection, and the pension grab. The heart of her book resides in her textual/framing analyses of network television in chapter 3, and mainstream newspaper coverage by USA Today, the New York