If the stoppage involves a service on which the readers of
the newspapers immediately depend, or if it involves a breach of
order, the news value is still greater.
The underlying trouble appears in the news through certain easily
recognizable symptoms, a demand, a strike, disorder. From the point of
view of the worker, or of the disinterested seeker of justice, the
demand, the strike, and the disorder, are merely incidents in a
process that for them is richly complicated. But since all the
immediate realities lie outside the direct experience both of the
reporter, and of the special public by which most newspapers are
supported, they have normally to wait for a signal in the shape of an
overt act. When that signal comes, say through a walkout of the men or
a summons for the police, it calls into play the stereotypes people
have about strikes and disorders. The unseen struggle has none of its
own flavor. It is noted abstractly, and that abstraction is then
animated by the immediate experience of the reader and reporter.
Obviously this is a very different experience from that which the
strikers have. They feel, let us say, the temper of the foreman, the
nerve-racking monotony of the machine, the depressingly bad air, the
drudgery of their wives, the stunting of their children, the dinginess
of their tenements. The slogans of the strike are invested with these
feelings.
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