After years of declining union influence in America, 2021 saw a historic resurgence in labor organizing, with a wave of strikes across numerous industries contributing to a resurgence to public attention to labor activism. Despite this newfound relevance, Media Matters found that cable news failed to cover the full scope of strikes across America in 2021, with the vast majority of strikes left unmentioned and most discussion concentrated in a one-month span. Print news largely did a better job than cable at producing thorough reporting on labor strikes, with some notable exceptions. 

Key Findings

• Cable news networks CNN, Fox News Channel, and MSNBC made no mention of specific strikes for the first four months of 2021 and spent only around 11 minutes discussing those strikes at all prior to October.
• Cable coverage throughout 2021 focused on just 18 workplace strike locations, with hundreds of strikes left entirely unmentioned.
• Cable coverage often failed to quote workers and organizers involved in the strikes, with Fox News quoting them in only 38% of its strike segments.
•  Print coverage of labor strikes fared a lot better than cable coverage: 
  • Among five major U.S. newspapers, 74% of all articles about strikes quoted workers or labor organizers. 
  • The New York Times printed 39 articles on strikes in a year, more than the number of segments any of the cable networks aired (and more than CNN and Fox News had combined).
• Print coverage still had some failures, such as USA Today publishing only three articles on labor strikes for the entire year. 

2021 was considered to be the “Year of the Worker,” producing unionization victories at outposts of major companies like Starbucks and a historic union vote at Amazon. Workers won significant gains as a result of labor strikes last year, including 10% wage increases, paths to full-time employment, and health subsidies. 

There are currently 14 million unionized employees in the U.S, thousands of whom went on strike in 2021. However, cable largely failed to cover the unprecedented year of labor actions.

Cable news outlets did not mention any specific strikes for half the year. When they did cover the topic, they discussed only a select few strikes – largely concentrated in a single month

The study, which took into account strikes that occurred in 2021, found CNN covered specific strikes the least, making only 20 mentions and airing only 11 segments focused on the year’s strikes. Fox News followed with 33 mentions and 24 segments and MSNBC aired 55 mentions and 36 segments, for a total of 108 mentions and 71 segments about labor strikes across all three networks. However, this coverage was far from evenly distributed across the year. 

From January through September, cable news mentioned active, ongoing, or future strikes only eight times, amounting to only around 11 minutes of discussion across all three networks. There were six months this past year – January, February, March, April, June, and September – when cable networks made no mention of these strikes whatsoever. CNN, which ultimately proved to be the network with the sparsest coverage in our study, mentioned a specific strike only once in the first nine months of 2021, during one 30-second segment. 

In October, when workers at several large corporations went on strike in what was dubbed “Striketober,” cable news coverage exploded, mentioning specific strikes 76 times and devoting 49 segments to coverage of the workers’ actions. The quality of this coverage varied starkly depending on the network. 

MSNBC hosts Ayman Mohyeldin and Chris Hayes ran segments on strikes that were rarely mentioned in other outlets’ coverage, such as the Alabama coal miners strike and the hospital workers strike in Buffalo, New York. 

The October 7 edition of Fox & Friends positively covered the Kellogg’s workers strike – but only through the framing of attacking President Joe Biden, with anti-union guest and Fox Business host Stuart Varney suggesting that the company’s outsourcing of jobs, one of the catalysts for the strike, would not have happened “if President Trump were still the president of these here United States.” (The outsourcing of U.S. jobs likely increased during the Trump presidency.) 

Fox prime-time host Tucker Carlson’s only mention of a specific strike in 2021 was when he applauded a group of General Electric workers for walking out over vaccine mandates during his October 27 show. 

When workers’ impetus for striking conflicted with Fox News’ preferred narratives, such as when Netflix employees walked out over the streaming company’s platforming of hateful anti-trans content, shows like Gutfeld! expressed decidedly anti-labor sentiment, with Fox News contributor Emily Campagno claiming it was “a luxury to treat work like a school where you get to roll out whenever you want.” 

Despite this boom in labor strike segments in October, the vast majority of cable news segments concentrated on only three strikes – those at John Deere and Kellogg’s and the Netflix walkout (the latter of which was rarely framed as a labor issue). These strikes, while justifiably earning widespread coverage due to their size or cultural relevance, comprised only 18 strike locations of the 370 workplace strikes that occurred in 2021, according to Cornell University’s Labor Action Tracker. 

In fact, only a handful of the hundreds of strikes that occurred in 2021 received any mention on cable news. Notable strikes that received no coverage over the course of the year were the United Brotherhood of Carpenters strike, which saw 2,000 contractors in Washington demand fair wages, and the strike at a Volvo plant in Virginia, which involved nearly 3,000 workers.

Cable news coverage of strikes fell sharply beginning in November, with only 17 mentions of specific strikes between November and December. This precipitous drop-off in coverage shows that October was an outlier in attention paid to labor action by cable networks, which chose to primarily focus on campaigns at three of the biggest name companies rather than highlighting the hundreds of other strikes across the country.   

Networks consistently failed to quote workers or unions in their coverage

Workers’ perspectives have historically been underrepresented in the media’s coverage of economic issues. At a time when unions and policies that benefit employees are frequently the target of conservative outlets – such as Fox News – it is all the more necessary for those fighting for fair pay and workplace protections to have their voices heard. 

Unfortunately, when the three cable news networks did cover strikes in 2021, they often failed to quote the workers or union representatives who were actually involved. CNN was the network which most frequently quoted workers or unions, quoting them in only 55% of strike segments. MSNBC followed closely, quoting workers or unions in 53% of such segments. Fox News was the only network that failed to quote workers or union representatives in the majority of its strike coverage, quoting them in only 38% of such segments.

Print coverage of 2021’s historic strikes was better than cable, but included notable failures

Print coverage of labor strikes in 2021 fared much better than its cable counterpart, resulting in what reporter Steven Greenhouse deemed the “resurgence of the labor beat.” However, our study revealed many lapses.

From January 1, 2021, to December 31, 2021, Media Matters counted all articles about labor strikes from five major U.S. newspapers: the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. In the course of a year, these five outlets published 98 combined articles about labor strikes, of which nearly three-quarters (74%) quoted workers involved with the strike. The New York Times printed 39 articles on strikes in a year, more than the number of segments on CNN and Fox News combined. The Wall Street Journal and The Washington Post each had more articles than CNN as well, with 28 and 20, respectively. 

Even though, overall, print media did a better and more thorough job reporting on labor strikes than cable news outlets in 2021, with labor reporters like The New York Times’ Noam Scheiber providing consistent coverage, there are still areas to improve. The Wall Street Journal quoted workers only half the time (50%) and spent the other half quoting management in its strike reporting. Two outlets also had limited and mediocre coverage of labor strikes: USA Today and the Los Angeles Times. USA Today, for the entire year, published only three articles about labor strikes, and two discussed the strikes largely through a lens of how they could affect the financial stability of the companies involved. The Los Angeles Times published only eight total articles about labor strikes in 2021, and it also quoted management the most out of the five newspapers (75%). 

It is inexcusable for national media, both in print and cable news, to not devote substantial reporting to new labor strikes and unionization efforts that affect thousands of workers across the country. In 2022, 185 union contracts — affecting 1.3 million workers — are set to expire, in what will likely be a big test for the commitment to better working conditions and pay for employees across the U.S. It is imperative that cable news and print media pay labor strikes the attention they deserve.

Methodology 

Media Matters search transcripts and articles in the Kinetiq and SnapStream video databases and the Factiva database, respectively, for all original programming on cable news networks CNN, Fox News Channel, and MSNBC and all print editions of the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and USA Today for any of the terms “worker,” “employee,” “staff,” “laborer,” “union,” or “member” within close proximity of any variation of any of the terms “strike,” “picket,” or “walkout” from January 1 through December 31, 2021.

We included any mention, teaser, segment, or article that referenced any past, present, or future labor strike that occurred in 2021 cataloged in the Labor Action Tracker from Cornell University. We did not include references to strike authorizations that did not later turn into actual strike actions. We also did not include references to strikes in general, including only those that named specific strikes. 

We defined segments as instances when a specific strike was the stated topic of discussion or when we found significant discussion of a specific strike. We defined significant discussion as instances when two or more speakers in a multitopic segment discussed a specific strike with one another. We defined mentions as instances when a single speaker mentioned a specific strike without another speaker engaging with the comment. We defined teasers as instances when the anchor or host promoted a segment about a specific strike scheduled to air later in the broadcast. We defined articles as instances that referenced a specific strike at least once in the body of the text.

We then reviewed all mentions, teasers, segments, and articles in their entirety for whether any speaker also quoted or paraphrased labor organizers or strikers, quoted or paraphrased management or company spokespersons, or discussed the direct financial impact or supply chain disruptions of the strike actions. Finally, we timed all mentions, teasers, and segments that included a named strike reference. For multitopic segments, we timed only the relevant speech. We rounded all times to the nearest minute.