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>> 153 6 How Wal-Mart Wins the War of Words The left is returning to its historic mission of being the avatar of genuine democracy in the teeth of a class-dominated, businessoriented society. It is the dedicated opponent of inequality, democracy ’s invariable cancer. . . . But this struggle to reduce inequality and to strengthen democracy will be incomplete for any prospective U.S. left without a vision of a more democratic media system, a program for media reform, and a strategic plan to organize around the issue. —Robert McChesney, Rich Media, Poor Democracy Wal-Mart’s critics, like most social movement activists, have a common goal: to be noticed in the press. For groups like Wal-Mart Watch, earning recognition in larger spheres of discourse is a prerequisite for success because these groups have no real constituency, such as a local chapter that meets regularly to discuss goals, tactics, and future endeavors. At best, their core “constituency ” is individuals who have given the organization an email address at which they receive periodic updates and urgings to contact an elected representative, sign a petition, or send an email to Wal-Mart’s CEO. At the same time, they have a much larger target constituency in the broader public, through whom changes may be accomplished by convincing them that an everyday activity (shopping) carries with it a larger moral significance. This can happen only when their arguments and activities become of interest to the national media. The national media is the master sphere in which the “primary claims” of activist groups are transformed into “secondary claims” by the national press.1 The media are considered “secondary claims” makers because “the press does not merely transmit claims; it translates and transforms them.”2 In other words, the way claims take shape in the public sphere is not accidental or arbitrary. In like manner, Myra Marx Ferree and colleagues have argued 154 > 155 States) and the Wall Street Journal (the paper of record for financial reporting ). Examining Wal-Mart discourse in leading print sources thus promises to tell us more about how discourse about the economy is performed and enacted at these highest levels of the public sphere. My concern in this chapter is therefore not so much to identify what discourse is most likely received among the American public, but instead to describe the kind of discourse that is produced and reproduced in key domains within the public sphere, and theorize what this means for Americans’ deliberations surrounding contentious economic issues. We have good reason to believe that the media plays a key role as a gatekeeper in shaping both the content and the quality of public discourse about market dilemmas, such as those raised by Wal-Mart and its business practices . The preeminent media sociologist Herbert Gans has written extensively about the connection between journalism and democracy, arguing that despite journalists’ implicit desire to encourage democracy by informing the citizenry, news media is, in practice, too focused on politics as a means of this empowerment, and as a result pays too “little attention to the other parts of society that affect the country’s democracy.”6 Chief among these exclusions, Gans argues, is a sustained investigation of the economy and the influence of economic institutions and processes on American citizens and democracy itself. This is not to say that journalists are in the pocket of corporations , or that journalists avoid the economy as a subject of news. Rather, Gans argues that a set of institutional conventions generally encourage certain forms of economic reporting at the expense of others that might expose more fully the hidden connections between economic and political power that serve to undermine democratic freedom. To be sure, recent developments in the economy and prominent social movements like Occupy Wall Street may challenge some of Gans’s conclusions, but his general argument about economic reporting is that journalists tend to package economic stories into at least one of four frames: the funding sources of election campaigns and political lobbying; corporations’ legal troubles; quantitative economic indicators such as unemployment rates, inflation, consumer confidence , and so on; and general business coverage of corporate performance and stock market earnings. Gans reasons that journalists may “believe the news audience to be uninterested in most economic news,” and suggests that “economic journalists could make economic news more appealing by borrowing some leads from the folk economics with which people make sense of their personal experiences in the economy.”7 The media historian and communications scholar...

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