Surprised by Solidarity in Wisconsin

Media erred in assuming public shared their distaste for unions

By Peter Hart
FAIR

One of the early assumptions in media coverage of the Wisconsin protests against Gov. Scott Walker’s proposed anti-labor legislation was that the public wouldn’t sympathize with “overpaid” public-sector workers. But soon enough, reality intervened.

The New York Times’ Matt Bai (2/27/11) recommended that “taking the fight to the unions is a good way to bolster your credentials as a gutsy reformer with voters who have been losing faith for years in public schools and government bureaucracies.”

In the March 7 Time, Amanda Ripley wrote that hating public workers is a historical fact: “Since the beginning, Americans have resented government workers’ asking for money. The distrust ebbs and flows, but the less financial security we have, the angrier we get.”

And CBS’s Jim Axelrod (2/18/11) declared, “Unions don’t have any sort of upper hand when it comes to public opinion these days.”

(More here.)