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Christopher Martin's new book, No Longer Newsworthy, is a major accomplishment for three reasons: its insightful take on combustible representations of "working class" (read white working class) augured by former President Trump's two presidential campaigns; its remarkable analysis of the loss since 1970 of a thriving labor journalism, and the ways in which this loss has contributed to the disappearance of a language that names and understands the very idea of the United States as a society with a working class; and its call for a revived labor journalism founded on the need for a countervailing power for workers if employment is to provide worker voice, equity, mobility, and security. Michael Hillard leads this symposium by highlighting Martin's economic analysis of the decline of labor journalism and how restoring working-class countervailing power now requires the revival of a robust "labor beat." Brooke Erin Duffy speaks directly to Martin's important observation that the changing media business model induced a switch from a producer- to consumerfocused journalism, but brings a gender lens to exploring how an oft-missed, and arguably ghettoized, "lifestyle" beat became a medium for guerrilla labor reporting on the struggles faced by the female pink- and white-collar workforce. This guerrilla reporting should be acknowledged, but a reformed journalism of the working class requires greater attention and respect for women's labor and occupations. Phela Townsend and Michael Hillard spell out Martin's account of how the 2016 presidential campaign revived a curious and problematic construction of "working class" after a 40-year absence, "whitewashing" the working class through a focus solely on the working class as white, male, and blue collar and the cause of Trump's surprise 2016 election. They offer a corrective perspective on the diversity of the US working class, the importance of representation in building an effective press, and the need for a long view on the nation's class and racial history. This symposium benefits greatly from a contribution by Steven Greenhouse, the nation's foremost labor journalist of the last generation, and at one point the only labor beat reporter in the entire nation. He brings a journalist's insight to the many extenuating reasons for the decline in labor reporting, especially the nearly 75% drop in union density since the 1950s and consequential attenuation of "labor drama," while noting the recent growth in labor reporting in online journalistic platforms, which has been stoked by the pandemic's impact on workers. Christopher Martin himself rounds out the collection by investigating how the pandemic's focus on "essential workers" has sparkeddemanded, reallya nascent re-emergence of an effective labor journalism. 997075ILRXXX10.1177/0019793921997075ILR REVIEWBOOK REVIEW SYMPOSIUM research-article2021 828 ILR Review A Critical Appreciation of Christopher Martin's No Longer Newsworthy Christopher Martin's recent No Longer Newsworthy (2019) provides a timely, insightful answer to the question: Why did US journalists, and the country's broad public, lose the ability to recognize the existence of a working class? Martin answers by charting labor journalism's decline since 1970, pointing to the many consequences of this decline for workers and even the fabric of our democracy. He joins recent labor scholars who chart how the death of the New Deal coalition and rise of neoliberalism produced a cultural shift in which the very concept of "the working class" disappeared from American political discourse. In its place, Martin shows, the mainstream media became cheerleaders of the 1%, aided and abetted by its new focus on the "upscale consumer" and the glamorous "entrepreneur." Consequently, the print and broadcast news allowed growing disparities of wealth and income and the dramatic deterioration of economic life for workers to largely escape notice. In this, the media has failed its essential role as a pillar of democracy; that is, its responsibility to "monitor power and offer a voice to the voiceless" (p. 134). US newspapers once maintained a robust "labor beat," delivered by expert labor reporters who portrayed the experiences and institutions of New Deal-era workers. These reporters were appreciative of the role of unions in providing needed countervailing power against US employers. Since 1970, the labor beat's disappearance was driven by the same structural forces that drove the decline of unionized American manufacturing but also transformed the media as a business. The pernicious consequences include a media credulous toward farright corporate narratives and the media's complicity in the rise of Trump. The causal forces undergirding Martin's analysis is a creative destruction story familiar to historically minded employment relations scholars. Beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, new structural forcesglobalization, automation, mergers, and the consequences of a new shareholder primacy in corporate governancechanged the US political economy and in turn the labor markets. These forces first hollowed out and then transformed the newspaper industry, the modern news media's original core. Prior to 1960, family-owned newspapers were economically strong and largely free of shareholder pressures. Large, urban, working-class audiences were central to their readership. At the height of organized labor's New Deal-era power, many newspaper owners amply sponsored expert coverage of workers, unions, and their issues, with notable exceptions such as the famously anti-union Los Angeles Times. Martin includes an important caveat: White newspaper owners explicitly redlined coverage of the Black working class, ignoring African American communities (p. 64). The now-familiar dynamics of creative destruction began after 1960. Newspapers faced a saturated and eroding market, as suburban flight sapped circulation and advertising revenues. Television news quickly gained importance, which was a development powerful enough to kill off major national weeklies such as the Saturday Evening Post and Life. Consolidation followed. As newspapers folded in significant numbers, two-newspaper cities declined. Large chains, such as Gannett and Knight Ridder, snapped up independent local papers, just when these companies became publicly traded entities. Stockholders now joined advertisers and readers as principals; by the 1980s, stockholders were the only principal that mattered. This shift eroded interest in a labor beat and eased newspapers' own union-busting of their typesetter unions to pave the way for automation. These developments ushered in a new business model. MBA-driven strategies encouraged abandonment of dedicated, non-affluent readers. Newspapers now targeted the suburban, college-educated, affluent readers the advertisers increasingly prized. Coverage of rural and urban working-class communities fell by the wayside. With television as an alternative, and with papers no longer covering their communities or issues, working-class readers stopped buying papers, which accelerated circulation decline. Labor reporting was displaced by travel, investment, food, and lifestyle beats that appealed to and "hailed" upscale consumers. Labor reporters either retired without being replaced, were reassigned, or laid off. Without expert labor reporters, the news media now framed labor strikes as inconveniences to consumers, not struggles for equity or justice. What is shocking about this story is just how consciously the media abandoned working-class readers. In industry trade publications marketed to advertisers, newspapers turned BOOK REVIEW SYMPOSIUM 829 decisively to focus on "quality demographics" rather than mass circulation, driving the shift to privilege "affluent moderns" and "influentials" (pp. 88, 96, 100) over the working class. This development went in tandem with corporate owners' willingness to bust their own workers' unionspreviously unthinkable but now less problematic. A new editorial focus on business eclipsed labor reporting. Newspapers in particular now hired large numbers of business reporters, far more than those who previously covered labor. Business pages offered a new theory of labor issues: They are solved individually, not collectively. "Job coaching," not organizing, became the Rx for workers' challenges, assuming "that all readers hold or desire such white-collar or pink-collar jobs, that they aspire to climb a careerist corporate ladder, and that the solution for any job dissatisfaction is to figure out how to either ingratiate oneself to the boss or look for another job" (p. 122). Personal finance reporting promoted a language of individual stock holding as the new economic democracy that made unions, collective action, and employment policy unnecessary. Martin points out the irony that, as wealth and income inequality accelerated, celebration of upward mobility through personal investmentand not examination of structural inequalitiesbecame a journalistic focus. As mainstream journalism found the working class "no longer newsworthy," an innovative right-wing presstargeting conservative whites, including workers but also business owners and retireesstepped into the vacuum. From direct mail, to cable news, to Twitter, right-wing media built a cultural ecosystem in one part of the working classthat is, white workers, hailing them directly (though not on class issues). A key through line in Martin's book is how this development not only made Trump possible but also heavily shaped the flawed mainstream coverage of his victory. Martin also charts the disappearance of labor from popular culture and political discourse. Post-1970, presidential candidates and presidents abandoned the language of the working class and their once-bipartisan support for collective bargaining. In its place, leaders of both parties adopted the neoliberal language of "working middle-class families," "consumers," "Wall Street," "investors," and "entrepreneurs." Mainstream journalists uncritically conveyed this new terminology, behind which workers and the role of and need for legitimate countervailing power disappeared. This move mirrored a new discourse celebrating the Horatio Algers and Rockefellers of our era: the term consumer replaced citizen; working class and middle class were bested by Wall Street. By 2000, entrepreneur was more common than working class, indicative of a new "wealth porn"celebratory coverage of CEOs, finance wizards, and the super-rich (pp. 147-51). Martin deepens our understanding of how New Deal liberalism was supplanted by a neoliberal, free-market ideology hostile to unions and government labor standards. Notably, he embraces a political economy familiar to the Labor and Employment Relations Association's institutional tradition, particularly the necessity and legitimacy of countervailing power, and how crucial it is that this perspective that once undergirded coverage of the working class has been lost. For example, Martin shows how journalists began to uncritically repeat the new conservative economic consensus that privileges untrammeled "free markets"a construct using theoretical deduction rather than empirical analysis to conclude that unions and government regulation are hindrances. To illustrate, Martin interrogates widespread news coverage of right-wing economic propaganda; specifically, conservative labeling of government regulations, especially those preventing worker abuse, as "job killers." By the 1990s, this term became a "politically charged bludgeon" used by "Republicans and business groups to attack government's legitimate regulatory roleprotecting consumers, workers, public health, and the environment" (p. 165). The news media, especially the Associated Press whose stories appeared in 3,000 papers daily, channeled this narrative with astonishing credulity. In the language of mass communication scholars, frequent media coverage of a topic is "agenda setting." Worse, uncritical adoption of a highly political "frame" normalizes spin as fact. When agenda setting and framing go unchallenged, it becomes propaganda, which "selects facts or invents them to serve the real purpose: persuasion and manipulation" (p. 164). Propaganda and journalism are opposites; what journalists do if they do their job correctly is to verify facts and truth. This the media failed to do in the case of "job killers," challenging the term's use in fewer than 10% of stories that mentioned it. Thus, journalism "of assertion" replaced "journalism of verification" (pp. 178-79). Martin concludes his fine book by modeling effective labor reporting. He flips the class script on "job killing" by demonstrating how financial engineering boosting CEO pay and 830 ILR Review private equity windfalls has itself been a potentand verifiablesource of "job killing" (pp. 181-92). He highlights two examples. When private equity owners' damaging actions led to the demise of union jobs in the conglomerate that included the classic Hostess baked goods, most news coverage highlighted consumers losing access to Twinkies, and not the betrayals of workers by private equity owners. Similarly, the curious coverage of Red for Ed teacher strikes left many journalists surprised that workers in red states with master's degrees were falling behind economically and willing to rebel. And Martin heralds that, in the New Deal era, both the press and the government equipped American workers with countervailing power against employers, concluding that "[t]oday, capital has no equal counterbalancing force in government or journalism. . . . with little power in an economy rife with inequality, where does one go, what does one do?" (p. 200). His recommendations should not surprise. News enterprises should stop focusing on only an upscale audience; have beats on the diverse groups that make up the working class; and adopt an informed recognition of the existence of a working class, giving voice to their experiences and struggles while highlighting the movements and institutions that hold promise for improving their lives. As Steven Greenhouse and Christopher Martin discuss in this symposium, there are green shoots of such a labor journalism. For Martin, continuity that generates expertise in covering laborthe core capacity journalists wield to speak truth to poweris essential. Such expertise would recognize how far the working class has moved away from the day when it was predominantly white, male, and blue collar, which would serve as a corrective of the failure of the news media to cover diverse communities even during the labor beat's heyday. (See Townsend and Hillard's essay in this symposium.) An effective citizenry is informed by journalism, and thus covering the labor beat is one of American democracy's most consequential needs. Martin's powerful prescriptive story is very much part of the policy agenda for the broad community of labor scholars and activists. Michael Hillard Professor of Economics University of Southern Maine m..d@maine.edu Newsworthy Work? The Marginal Status of Feminized Labor Against the backdrop of the profound social, economic, and political upheaval wrought by COVID-19, media accounts abound registering the impact of the pandemic on US workers. While front-page features chronicle the perilous plight of "essential workers," news reports laud the unionization efforts of hourly wage earners and gig economy participants alike. Even fast-food industry workersa category of employee long unheeded by media outletsare garnering visibility amid coverage of localized efforts to furnish them greater job security (de Freytas-Tamura, New York Times, December 17, 2020). But lest we forget that this ostensible surge in attention to the working class is a relatively new, or perhaps more aptly, renewed development, Christopher Martin's No Longer Newsworthy (2019) lucidly reminds us. Both insightful and compelling, the book makes clear that the recent wave of pandemic-related coverageincluding the championing of collective bargaining processesmarks an abrupt departure from the status that American labor occupied for much of the past half century. Martin devotes considerable attention to the role of news frames in steering public understandings of work and the working class. This analytical focus is perhaps not surprising given that his first monograph, Framed! Labor and the Corporate Media (2004), offered an in-depth treatment of media narratives of the labor movement. In the current book, Martin details the mainstream media's gradual abandonment of the working class and the subsequent waning of public support for organized labor. The nation's transition from producer- to consumercentrism offers productive scaffolding for the patterned recasting of labor strikesfrom expressions of collective worker strife into "consumer inconveniences" (p. 111). What, in the BOOK REVIEW SYMPOSIUM 831 1940s, represented workers' struggles for socially inclusive growth was, in later decades, supplanted by accounts of frustrated commuters facing traffic delays and cancelled trips. Martin demonstrates that this shift was also a response to the changing political economies of newspapers, whichlike other mass media industries of the late 20th centurydeployed market segmentation practices in earnest. The collective upshot of such industrial activities was, as Joseph Turow details, an "unrelenting slicing and dicing of America" (Breaking Up America: Advertisers and the New Media World, 1997). Indeed, through a rich analysis of the newspaper trade publication Editor & Publisher, Martin shows how news executives sought to lure advertisers with the assurance that their papers would provide access to the "right kind" of readers (p. 70). This was, of course, a euphemism for overwhelmingly white, middle- and upper-class audiencesthose believed to hold the lion's share of consumer spending power. Together, these dynamic media frames and market segment logics reflected the broader onward march of America into what Lizabeth Cohen has persuasively described as A Consumers' Republic (2004). The new market focus of the news industry had significant implications for the nature and tone of journalism, too. Martin contends that both a symptom and a consequence of attention to perceived upmarket tastes was a progressive displacement of the labor beat. Instead of covering unionization efforts, journalists from the 1970s onward were tasked with covering finance and providing fodder about the workplace for dedicated "lifestyle" sections. With the notable exception of the "social justice" commitment of longtime Chicago Tribune columnist Carol Kleiman, Martin notes how much of the content in the workplace "lifestyle" sections was glibif not utterly frivolous. As evidence that the halcyon days of labor reporting had gone, he offers recent headlines from the Chicago Tribune workplace column, which include features on "doughnuts," "office part[ies]," and the place of "emotions" in the office (p. 122). The presumed audience of such fluff, Martin explains, is "pink- and white-collar workers," and more pointedly, "striving individuals . . . laboring in cubicles and trying to climb the corporate ladder" (p. 120). In this consumerist media landscape, the realities of working-class labor and struggle seem invisible. As insightful as Martin's assessment of labor coverage along the axis of class is, the story looks somewhat different through the lens of gender. Conventional class-struggle journalism no doubt dwindled in the late 20th century, but this argument is complicated by the news media's relationship to gendered labor and, more precisely, what social theorist Lisa Adkins has described as a cultural feminization of work ("Cultural feminization," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 2001). Indeed, lifestyle directives on successfully navigating the service sectorsslight as they might seem through a grittier lensare still labor coverage of a sort. Recent years have seen significant workplace stories and events shoehorned into "style," "lifestyle," or even "fashion" sectionspresumably because of their focus on feminized (read: less important) categories of work. A 2013 feature on "The no-limits job," for example, explored the gruelingnear inhumaneworking conditions of entry-level employment in the media and publishing sectors (Wayne, New York Times, March 1, 2013). The feature reported a staggering 68% decline in the net worth of those younger than 35 and quoted a new-media manager who sought to "hire a 22-22-22," that is, "a 22-year-old willing to work 22-hour days for $22,000 a year." Tellingly, the article appeared in the Times' "Fashion" section, and all of the young workers interviewed were women. The following year, an article detailing the various modes of exploitation that characterize internships was similarly relegated to the "Fashion" section (Williams, New York Times, February 14, 2014). Such reports of mostly women workers failed to register the same level of attention they would have gained had they received more prominent placement in the paper. But, of course, women's work has long been an afterthought of capitalist economies. Even a well-researched, post-#MeToo article compiling legal advice for "When you experience sexual harassment at work" (Safronova, New York Times, November 10, 2017) was sidelined from broader conversations when, instead of a headline feature, it appeared in the "Style" section. The marginalization of feminized work runs parallel to what Martin frames as a class-based segmentation of the workplace and the winnowing away of coverage of the unionized and industrial working class. Journalism scholars such as Carolyn Kitch and Kimberly Voss have offered important perspectives on the historical value of "women's sections"style, fashion, entertainment, and the like. In a 2013 Columbia Journalism Review feature chronicling the fraught framing of "women's pages," Sarah Jaffe explained that "while reserving a separate space for 'women's issues' meant that things like parenting, fashion, and the beginnings of 832 ILR Review the feminist movement got column inches, the separation also demarcated the women's page as the site of less newsy content, a 'pink ghetto' that still persists" ("From women's page to style section," Columbia Journalism Review, 2013). Such a patterned sidelining of gender-coded labor has had the same impact as the other shifts Martin critiques: It has left minor voices at the margins, thwarting the kind of mass political strife that spurs collective action. Rather than a critique, this gendered insight is an invitation for further research. It expands labor struggles beyond the unionized working class that are similarly rendered invisible; stories of overwork and exploitation similarly hemmed in as of-interest to limited readership. And the point goes further. Independent of such news coverage, labor itself underwent a number of crucial shifts in the period covered in this book. The recessions of the 1970s and 1980s, the neoliberal assault on unions and frayed social safety nets, the ascent of postindustrialism, and the diversification of the labor markettogetherpresent notable challenges to what exactly we understand labor and labor struggles to be. There is no doubt that Martin's rigorously researched and elegantly written book makes a compelling argument about the shifting political economy of labor struggles in the media. It shows how social institutionsmost especially politics, media, and financehave played a role in the staggering fissures in our economy. In thinking about the role that these fractures have played in diverting collective advocacy, we can also use Martin's framing to understand at least one other mainstream media abandonment: feminized labor. Brooke Erin Duffy Associate Professor of Communication Cornell University b..y@cornell.edu Newsworthy for Whom? Christopher Martin's No Longer Newsworthy (2019) opens with a tantalizing challenge: Why did the mainstream US news media resuscitate use of the term "working class" that excluded much of the actual working class? Martin chronicles the recent disappearance of a labor beat, and with it, coverage of the working class. Trump's surprise 2016 election revived journalists' use of the term, but in deeply flawed ways. The media essentialized working class to mean only white, male, and blue collar. After the election, it sought to explain Trump's surprise election, embarking on journalistic "safaris" to the heartland states that swung the election to Trump. While curious of these voters' political allegiances and their individual stories, journalists, lacking labor beat expertise, were incurious about telling a larger story about all who might reasonably be considered working class (Jaffe, "Whose class is it anyway?" 2019: 87; Tankersley, The Riches of This Land, 2020). Martin deconstructs this new class narrative. Essentializing white working-class swing state voters as the key to Trump's 2016 victory misses many other crucial factors, including voter suppression targeting voters of color, Clinton's poor campaign strategy and voter misogyny toward her, FBI Director Comey's actions and Russian interference, and voter exhaustion with Democrats after eight years of the Obama presidency. To illustrate, Martin dissects the flawed coverage of Trump's signal election-year momenthis commitment to prevent Carrier, a division of United Technologies' Corporation (UTC), from moving 1,400 Indiana factory jobs to Mexico. After forgetting his early promise to take action, Trump was prompted by Fox News after the election to follow up. The national media repeated Fox's framing of Carrier as a political story that emphasized white, blue-collar worker/victims whose livelihoods Trump resuscitated. Stories featured grateful white male workers, whose gratitude for Trump explained his victory. In fact, Carrier's workforce was 60% black and 40% female, and its union, United Steelworkers (USW) Local 1999, was governed by a board of eight black and three white officials. Many members supported, and the local had endorsed, Bernie Sanders. If told as a labor story, journalists would have noted all of this and emphasized Local 1999's activism in protesting UTC's plans; critically analyzed UTC's misuse of its deep pockets, including a golden parachute for a previously fired CEO and $10 billion in recent stock buybacks; and debunked the weakness of Trump's ad hoc actionsMike Pence, still BOOK REVIEW SYMPOSIUM 833 Indiana's governor, showered UTC with $7 million in tax giveaways, ultimately saving only half of the 1,400 jobsas a substantive policy method for addressing deindustrialization. Martin concludes: "In the Trumpian economic populism, the white, male Carrier workers the news media featured, to the exclusion of others, suggested which Americans have jobs worth saving" (2019: 43). Martin thus opens the door to a critical discussion, whether journalistic best practice, or scholarly work: How should we understand the US working class? Unlike journalists' narrow construction, Martin joins scholars who insist that how we understand, study, and cover the US working class be grounded in a critical analysis of social identities and the overlapping systems of oppression that have an impact on workers. Following Michael Zweig, he rejects stratification theories of class that ignore or elide structural systems of power and oppression (Zweig, The Working Class Majority, 2000). To Zweig, the working class includes those who must work for a wage and have little power at work or in society per se; 62% of the labor force meets Zweig's definition (Zweig 2000: 28-29). This definition is structural, embedded in a larger political economy, that is best understood as "the forces acting upon workers" including globalization, shareholder primacy, employer attacks on worker power, and fissuring that has debased employment, made it hard to retain or join a union, and broadly eroded equity, voice, security, and mobility (Fink, "The great escape: How a field survived hard times," 2011: 8). What about working-class social identities? Less than 25% of the working class is blue collar, including occupations such as meatpacking, in which only one-fifth of frontline workers are white (King, "Counting the working class for working-class studies," 2019; Fremstad, Rho, and Brown, "Meatpacking workers are a diverse group who need better protections," 2020). A majority are in low-wage and precarious jobs, with median annual earnings of approximately $26,000. Crucially, the working class's demographic composition43% workers of color and 46% femalebelies the Trumpian white male trope. Thus, "working class" should conjure nursing home, fast food, janitorial, and fulfillment and call center workers who are female and/or a person of color (Draut, "Understanding the working class," 2018). The list of what female, LGBTQ, and BIPOC workers face that white men do not is long. The heralded New Deal-era labor market, and its labor and social legislation, largely bypassed women and workers of color. Structural racism brings distinct oppressions: occupational segregation into the dirtiest, toughest, and lowest paid jobs; a 400-year history of persistent barriers to acquiring the quality education and wealth that many white workers have had access to; and racist treatment by employers, managers, and white workers. Women of all races still cope with the double shift, persistent occupational segregation, and sexual harassment on the job. Immigrant workers still perform the tough stoop labor required to pick our food, and they face racism and the many burdens of undocumented status. And disparities in exposure to and deaths from COVID-19 faced by "essential workers" have made the pandemic's impact a story of the contemporary working class, understood through an intersectional lens that places workers of color and women in the public jobs most exposed to the pandemic. Workplace oppression is further interwoven with the many-sided racist phenomena these workers face when they punch out of work, as the murders of Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and George Floyd so painfully illustrate. It is important to note that scholars must be cautious in holding the New Deal era as a "Golden Age," as it could easily leave us to celebrate a period when, for example, Jim Crow and other discriminatory institutions are alive and well. However, in looking back retrospectively to earlier centuries, and in adopting a critical and intersectional lens to this periodization, we are able to fully acknowledge America's long-standing legacy of exclusion and oppressionone marked with annexation, genocide, and slaverywhile bringing into focus the reality that many marginalized workers were not beneficiaries of the social contract of this era. While Martin, indeed, points to the media's purposeful exclusion of African American communities in reporting, its failure to hire Black reporters, and its overall whitewashing of the working class, his framing that the news media "abandoned" the working class runs the risk of leaving the reader to nostalgize an era that while seen by many as progressive was at the same time exclusionary and regressive. In fact, with this more critical framing, the term "abandon" (as offered in the book's title) no longer holds up, as we come to recognize that the mainstream media never served the full working class. Noted labor journalist Sarah Jaffe describes the flaws and "work" being done by journalists and social observers who participate in what she calls "whitewashing of the working class"; that is, holding up the white, male, blue-collar worker as "the" quintessential worker. 834 ILR Review She argues that journalists and the public have turned "white working class" into an identity category, bereft of understanding class based on "relationship(s) of power, one's relationship to the workplace and the means of production" (Jaffe 2019: 95). If working class and white go together, "the corollary is that nonwhite people are not working" (p. 95); that is, the nonwhite are poor "takers'' who live off of welfare and form an "underclass." Crucially, this identity theory of the white working class reifies class as a characteristic that "is just something you are, as immutable as the color of your skin" (p. 96). Thus, the media are doing the work of establishing the appropriate barometer of what whiteness and the working class are, or are not, thereby not only contributing to the creation, reconstitution, and reproduction of our "common knowledge" notions of race, racial divisions, and politics but also preserving a construction of white racial privilege that "valoriz[es] . . . whiteness as treasured property in a society structured on racial caste" (Harris, "Whiteness as property," 1993: 1713). In short, while the media are ostensibly concerned with covering and humanizing this forgotten segment of the American working class that has been left behind, it is also, paradoxically, affirming and defending the privilege that is attached to whiteness (Harris 1993). It is materially, symbolically, and ideologically embodied in the narrow ideal that, in fact, these workers, the voters in the blue, swing states, decided the outcome of the 2016 election, and it is they who truly matter. This understanding of whiteness as a privileged position of social standing has historically 1) afforded white workers a public and psychological wage, compensating them for their low economic wages; and 2) formed the basis of a cross-class political alliance uniting white workers and capitalists against workers of color (Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America: 1860-1880, 1935; Olson, The Abolition of White Democracy, 2004). This cross-class alliance, then, which has largely benefited capitalists, works to sustain "a system of racial privilege and subordination that deflects attention from class, gender, and other grievances" (Olson 2004: 16) and, in turn, affixes a set of power relations that ensure the maintenance of American capitalist and political order. Moreover, who the media are also matters. Stories must not be just about the problems that workers face; they must also be told by, for, and with workers. What story is told is just as important as how the story is told. In the past, workers of color and participants in labor movements had their own media that were decidedly not mainstream, but they existed. Media and news stories reflect assumptions not only about who is worthy to be covered, who is given humanity, or who is compelling, but also about who can be in the newsroom in the first place, and who has authority and power to frame reporting. The working-class experience is as broad and varied as ever, and thus, the media should make room for the working class in all of its diversity, both in its storytelling and in who makes up the media. With better representation, perhaps we would encounter more pieces wondering what "Black workingclass voters" or "Latinx working-class voters" are thinking or doing. What are the consequences of white-washed narratives of the working class? First, they keep us from acknowledging and adequately understanding the full breadth of the challenges that workers face. Second, they undermine strong and effective labor movements and forms of activism necessary for building broad-based, coalitional power among workers, which is crucial for the radical change required to achieve equality and justice for all workers. Addressing these consequences requires action. As noted, a stark increase in representation among journalists is obviously an important start. As scholars, journalists, or citizens, let us deploy frames in our work that recognize an insight that has been historically missing from most of our journalism and public discourse: Many "working classes" occur within a larger one, all of whom are newsworthy