Globalization, media and democracy: The struggle over the framing of the 1997 UPS strike

This dissertation argues that collective struggle can create a more democratic media system even under a neoliberal global economy that severely limits democracy. I argue that while the corporate media have an institutional interest in upholding the policies of globalization, the vast majority of people who have not benefited from it can successfully resist globalization and its representation in the media. This is vividly demonstrated by the UPS strike of 1997 and how the mainstream media framed it.; I conducted a detailed study of the coverage of the strike in major newspapers and on network television. The research revealed that, initially, mainstream coverage of the UPS strike had a distinct pro-corporate bias. Nationalist rhetoric helped present corporate viewpoints as being coterminous with the interests of all American people. This pro-corporate stance gave way over the course of the strike to an accommodation to the views of labor in some media outlets. This shift, I argue, was a product of several factors; most visibly, the fact that public opinion was decisively in favor of labor.; Based on my analysis of more than five hundred news reports and transcripts, I argue that the treatment of this strike in the media demonstrates the ability of organized labor not only to intervene in public discourse and widen the range of political debate but also to mobilize a broader sense of class solidarity that can become the basis of a generalized resistance against globalization. The implications of this analysis for our understanding of the “public” interest, democracy and the creation of more democratic media systems are significant, as it allows us to rethink resistance to corporate-dominated media systems in collective terms.