Outside the box: Corporate media, globalization, and the UPS strike.(Book review)

Kumar, D. (2007). Outside the box: Corporate media, globalization, and the UPS strike. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press. 237 pages.

Students of the news will welcome Deepa Kumar's analysis of coverage of the 1997 UPS strike. Media coverage of that strike was notable for its departure from standard narratives concerning labor-management disputes. Most often, strikes are framed as disruptive, inconvenient to the public, and harmful to the economy. While news reports about the UPS strike often reflected these pro-business sentiments, they also, at times, represented labor's point of view. Kumar presents a comprehensive examination of why this coverage was anomalous.

Kumar adopts a "domination/resistance" model of media power, following Gramsci's notion of hegemony. Based on this model, she argues that the news media are contradictory institutions that most often uphold the status quo by an over-reliance on official sources, and by unreflectively reproducing a professional ideology congruent with values and beliefs of the country's power structures. She takes liberal apologists of the news media to task for their easy acceptance of the marriage of capitalism and democracy, criticizes the Chomsky-Herman model of political economy of the media for its overemphasis on the engineering of consent, and skewers postmodernist versions of cultural studies for their valorization of textual reading as resistance.

Kumar maintains that, for the last third of the twentieth century, neoliberal strategies of globalization have given rise to a whole series of working class issues that were not unique to UPS: part-time employment, stagnant wages, subcontracting, speedups, diminished safety and health protection, and the pension grab. The heart of her book resides in her textual/framing analyses of network television in chapter 3, and mainstream newspaper coverage by USA Today, the New York Times, and the Washington Post in chapter 4. Kumar's analysis reveals that media coverage went through three stages. Initially, the strike was framed traditionally as a disruptive inconvenience, as articulated through management-friendly sources, including business and political leaders, and conservative think tank experts. But by the second week of the strike, the news frames adopted by ABC, the Washington Post, and the New York Times shifted to a more favorable view of labor's position. Indeed, the Times highlighted the fundamental inequalities experienced by workers even as the economy flourished. To account for this shift, Kumar describes the communicative actions of UPS management and of the Teamsters. The latter's reformist leader, Ron Carey, challenged the hegemony of the nationalist narrative and offered a counter-hegemonic frame in the form of labor nationalism. In a USA Today/Gallup poll, the public favored the strikers by 55% to just 27% for UPS. While the strikers won the battle for the hearts and minds of the public and gained concessions at the bargaining table, news coverage of labor relations after the "victory" lapsed into pre-strike practices.

The real value of Kumar's work is to show how the public sphere can be enlivened by the active agency of workers raising legitimate questions of social and economic justice. In exploring the UPS strike, she offers a historically grounded model for enhanced working class consciousness, heightened working class agency, and improved media-labor relations in the future.

Patrick Daley (Ph.D., University of Iowa) is an associate professor of Media Studies in the Department of Communication at the University of New Hampshire. His research centers on news analysis and the critique of ideology.

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