This is gonna be a short log, I can feel it. I just wanted to voice my disappointment on the subject of media coverage, or more specifically, what media chooses to cover.
I've been working in the restaurant/food service industry since I was fifteen years old. Being that I'm now 30, that's a pretty long time. I've been coffee/counter girl at 6 a.m. in the morning, busser or hostess at night and that progressed into waiter and bartender. It's a happening field. It changes with the times and as exhausting as the work is, it's exciting too. But it comes with many complications. Tips are a tricky issue, both for taxes and wages and the laws designed to protect servers are almost always ignored. I recently ran into trouble with my current boss and I've been running into trouble with potential employeers. Even with 15 years of experience and a list of patrons that will follow me anywhere I have trouble getting hired because I insist on my employers meeting CT labor law standards and they're pretty content with ignoring them.
When I researched my rights, and the laws that protect them, I found I had to dig and dig and dig to get any information at all. There were finally articles I found, most that had been posted by Law Firms themselves with regards to cases they had won. There was absolutely no main stream coverage of Lawsuits against restaurateurs, even though they did exist. According to the online law pamphletts and advertisements, tens of millions of dollars had been won by the prosecutors (in most cases the servers) in one case alone yet no significance had been given to the topic by the media.
I understand the subject is extra sensitive to me, everyone who has problems wishes others thought them important enough to print on a front page, but when workers through out the US are getting taken advantage of, where's the press? Don't they have some sort of moral obligation to uncover unfairness of this sort. The sad conclusion I came to was no, they don't. The press has absolutely no moral obligation to the public. What they decide to report is entirely inspired by how much attention they think it will get them. If a topic is about a group of people other's don't seem to give a damn about, then they don't care if laws are being broken and lives are being degraded. It's sad really.
After reading the Shudson book I wondered if this phenomenon is solely based on media's dependency upon advertising. Perhaps if their primary concern wasn't volume then they won't care as much, but it will never be realistic to think media groups won't be concerned with volume, as revenue is what drives everything they do. So how does someone get the media to care about what they themselves care about? It seems the only way is to first heighten public awareness through word of mouth, or education and inject the community with a sensitivity to it first. In this respect the media doesn't influence us, we've influenced them; we've actually gone farther then influencing them, we've down right dictated what they're going to pay attention to.
1 comment:
I understand what you are saying , my last boss did incredibly illegal things and everyone who worked for him knew it. We had 30 percent of our credit card tips taken out of our pay and we had 12 hour shifts with no breaks. Even though we knew this couldn't possibly be allowed, none of us had ever heard of a waiter or bartender actually benefitting from pressing charges, so we just accepted it.
There's a lot of things the media just doesn't look into even though it is an injustice. When we were kids we thoughts reporters were people who looked for corruption and tried to blow it wide open, and yet the adult world is different. There are politics involved. Reporters don't want to step on the wrong toes, and so it's the working class that feels the crunch.
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