The New York Times is At It Again
Paper “of Record” Reports Historic Teamsters News Through Distorted Lens
On Monday, June 15, at its 31st International Convention, Teamsters General President Sean M. O’Brien announced the labor union had organized 100,000 workers in the past four years.
On Tuesday, June 16, O’Brien won reelection to a second term by a vote of over 96 percent — the first time ever that a Teamsters General President was reelected without opposition and a leadership slate was directly elected by white ballot at the convention.
On Wednesday, June 17, O’Brien made an historic announcement that the Teamsters and the Department of Justice had filed a joint motion to end government monitorship of the union.
Eventually, nearly a full week following all this news, The New York Times got around to publishing the following headline. It reports the facts, albeit with a political bent.
Then the news outlet took it down and replaced it with this:
The lesson from The New York Times: If you’re not getting enough clicks, just change the headline. Sensationalize. Take a page from the New York Post.
It’s no secret that the Times has a long history of denigrating the Teamsters. It took decades for the paper to finally stop lowercasing the “t” in Teamsters, a diminutive meant to diminish the union in typeface.
Here’s what the Times chose not to report in its story about the reelection of O’Brien and the end to government monitorship:
Corporate monitorship: The federal monitorship of the Teamsters Union is set to end after 37 years. It is virtually unheard of for the government to monitor or exercise control over a public or private entity for this length of time. That alone is newsworthy.
The Times failed to provide real context for what this means. On the rare occasions that corporations face monitorship, they often declare bankruptcy, change their names, or enter into non-prosecution agreements. Most monitorships last no more than three to five years.
The Teamsters’ external oversight has lasted nearly four decades. It is long past time for it to come to an end, and even the Times couldn’t find a single person to argue otherwise.
Mob Ties: Despite the clickbait headline, the Times knows there hasn’t been an organized crime case involving the Teamsters in decades. But “mob ties” remains a convenient trope when the goal is to attract readership revenue.
The Teamsters Union operates under more rigorous auditing, financial disclosure, and review requirements than the majority of organizations — including The New York Times, where NewsGuild members had to fight just two years ago to receive the wages they were owed.
F-Bombs: Multiple references to O’Brien’s use of “profanity” condescends the Teamsters. Curse words may offend the sensibilities of the graduate-educated, high-income Brooklynite readership bracket of The New York Times. But the 4,000 Teamsters who participated in the convention didn’t mind one damn bit. They joined in.
What is offensive is the reductive reporting that continues to dominate coverage of this union in the Business section.
The New York Times had an opportunity to report comprehensively on the successful conclusion of nearly 40 years of monitorship, the reforms that made it possible, and what this union did to make it happen.
Instead, the paper’s reporters and editors chose to ignore and disparage the accomplishments and milestones that benefit 1.3 million Teamsters by reaching for clichés about mobsters.
What a fucking disgrace.