Covering for the Bosses

Extra! Extra! Read all about it! Labor historian charges southern dailies with conservative bias!! Or so the newsboy would call out over Joseph B. Atkins's book covering southern newspapers’ sympathetic relations with anti-union businesses and regional boosters. An openly prolabor historian and journalist, Atkins addresses the subject with a surprising amount of personal bias. Yet the book certainly adds fodder to the historical debate centering on southern change and continuity over the past 150 years. Atkins argues that antilabor conservatism is perhaps the greatest example of historical continuity in the region's history, and the southern press has played a key role in the region remaining a bastion of antilabor conservatism. Atkins avoids a linear chronological review of antilabor bias of the southern media. Rather, he presents specific cases that illustrate his overall thesis. Openly acknowledging his own southern “working-class sympathies,” the author nonetheless makes a logical argument that anti-unionism has defined the South politically since the 1870s and is also a major component of the southernization of the United States and the global economy (p. 5). As he writes: conservative, pro-business politics have become the nation’s, whose tax breaks, lucrative incentive packages, limited regulation, low wages, and right-to-work laws have become part of the global strategies of international corporations. (p. 7

Argument (complex analysis · Conservatism · Economic history · Economics · Incentive · Market economy · Newspaper · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Subject (documents · History · Labor Movements and Unions · Law