Credit Where Credit Is Due

MTP is booking the AFL-CIO president this Sunday:

NBC’s Meet the Press today booked AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka for Sunday. We applaud NBC’s decision and encourage the other networks (ABC, CBS, Fox News, and CNN) to also give a voice to working people.

And from the comments at ThinkProgress, I think this is especially poignant:

We can only hope that the corporate media shows as much enthusiasm for the union protesters and their supporters as they did for the teabaggers.

That's almost an apt comparison, at least on the surface. I guarantee that the Wisconsin protestors won't receive nearly as deferent or constant coverage as the teabaggers did, but what's worth noting here is the difference in the substance of their protests. The teabaggers are a group of educated, wealthy, old educated white males that rail and vomit demonstrably false screeds about the tyranny of record levels of federal taxation and free healthcare and are clearly manipulated as ignorant pawns by their corporate handlers since many of Obama's policies would immensely benefit them directly.

The Wisconsin protesters, on the other hand, are fighting against what is an obvious assault on their rights. Despite having offered up economic concessions that Gov. Walker supposedly seeks to help aid the state budget deficit, he is unrelenting and continues to demand that they relinquish their right to collectively bargain:

But Mr. Walker isn’t interested in making a deal. Partly that’s because he doesn’t want to share the sacrifice: even as he proclaims that Wisconsin faces a terrible fiscal crisis, he has been pushing through tax cuts that make the deficit worse. Mainly, however, he has made it clear that rather than bargaining with workers, he wants to end workers’ ability to bargain.

Why bust the unions? As I said, it has nothing to do with helping Wisconsin deal with its current fiscal crisis. Nor is it likely to help the state’s budget prospects even in the long run: contrary to what you may have heard, public-sector workers in Wisconsin and elsewhere are paid somewhat less than private-sector workers with comparable qualifications, so there’s not much room for further pay squeezes.

So it’s not about the budget; it’s about the power.

I will let you be the judge if you think the media will actually report on these differences, or give the Wisconsin workers even the modicum of coverage of the fap job that they gave the teabaggers week after week.

So to summarize: I started this post with the intent of giving NBC and the media-at-large credit for booking a union leader on Meet the Press, and then spent the rest of the post deriding the media anyway.