Evidence of Bias in the Chicago Tribune Coverage of Organized Labor

Labor leaders contend newspaper coverage of unions is unjustifiably negative and is usually fixated on conflict and corruption. While this attitude is broadly shared across the union spectrum, there has been little actual objective analysis of labor news reporting to substantiate or discredit the common belief. In an attempt to assess the accuracy of labor’s claim, a ten-year content analysis of industrial relations coverage in the Chicago Tribune was conducted. Unlike conventional media studies of organized labor, the Tribune analysis is an attempt to define and quantify the “tone” of news coverage on the basis of multiple content variables.