Working Class News
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April 8th, 2016

Working Class News

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Working-class news used to be a thing. At least, that’s what I heard back in the early 2000’s. It was the dark days of the early Bush administration, back when “why do you hate America” or “why do you love Saddam?” were questions readers emailed me on a daily basis. People like Randi Rhodes, Ed Schultz, Al Franken, and the great Thom Hartmann were on the radio trying to keep liberalism alive, and I was doing the same on the comics pages. I was up late, trying to finish Candorville and send it off before my deadline, when Thom Hartmann said something totally unfamiliar to me.

He said “labor pages.” “What the hell is that?” I thought. Apparently, at least according to Hartmann, newspapers didn’t just use to have business pages, they used to also have sections devoted to working class news. News affecting blue collar workers and unions. He went on to mention that sometime after Reagan began his concerted attack on labor unions, papers everywhere, one by one, began to drop these sections.

I wouldn’t know. Back then, all I read were the opinion pages and the comics. If you’re going to tell me working class news once existed in the form of “labor pages,” you might as well tell me unicorns once existed. I grew up in the Eighties. When I’ve seen the working class covered, it’s almost always been coverage of how its existence and needs affect the middle class.


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