James A. McClure

The death of Ed Asner last week at age 91 prompted TV stations to resurrect clips of the actor’s most memorable role: Lou Grant, the crusty news editor on the Mary Tyler Moore Show from 1970 to 1977 and the Lou Grant show from 1977 to 1982.

The archetype of the tough but nurturing editor resonated with the American public because it was true. Everybody who worked in journalism in the middle of the Twentieth Century probably had an editor a little like Lou Grant. 

For me it was a Chicago newspaper editor who taught journalism classes part-time at Northwestern University. His classes were a boot camp in which any deviation from accuracy and clarity was met with stinging criticism. A few of the women in the class were reduced to tears, which probably would get him fired today. 

The Chicago City News Bureau, a legendary training ground for reporters, had a sign in its newsroom that read: “IF YOUR MOTHER SAYS SHE LOVES YOU, CHECK IT OUT.” 

During my public relations career it was challenging (and fun) to match wits with reporters who drilled relentlessly for verifiable facts. And when I supervised my company’s employee publications I let my writers and editors know that Lou Grant was my favorite TV show. 

Demanding editors guided journalism’s climb from the disrepute of Yellow Journalism to respectability by mid-century. They tempered the crusading passion of young reporters by insisting on scrupulous fact-checking and unimpeachable sources, as Ben Bradlee did with Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein in the Washington Post’s Watergate coverage. By the 1970s around 70% of Americans trusted the media to report the news fully, accurately and fairly. 

Times have changed. Today’s editors are at the mercy of their reporters and their job security is at an all-time low. Editors are losing their jobs over a politically incorrect remark, an unsubstantiated allegation, or for publishing an op-ed by a member of the opposition party. Any editor who acted like Lou Grant (or my journalism professor) would be canceled immediately.

Objective reporting has been replaced by political advocacy that’s more like the Nineteenth Century than the Twentieth. There are many reasons for this, but the result is that the news media now play the same rabble-rousing role in today’s public discourse that they did in the Spanish-American War. Editorial guardrails and enforcement of standards have no place in this environment. 

It’s no surprise that the percentage of Americans who trust the news media has fallen from 70% to 40% with a sharp division along party lines. Because business now has more credibility than the news media, public relations professionals are shifting from traditional press-agentry to podcasts, social media and other alternatives to get their message out. 

Solid journalism still exists but readers have to look beyond newspapers and TV networks to find it. Seasoned journalists like Glenn Greenwald are publishing on their own via digital platforms such as Substack. Nonprofit newsrooms and digital media have taken over much of the investigative reporting the traditional news media used to do. I’ll bet some of them have editors. 

Life is all about taking risks when you get right down to it: your first steps as a toddler, your first day of school and so on to starting a family, launching a business or contemplating cancer treatment. Calculating risk versus reward is a mostly automatic process that takes place in the brain and the gut. 

We all have individual perceptions of risk that may or may not make sense. I’m okay with riding in an airplane that’s catapulted from an aircraft carrier but you’re not getting me on a motorcycle.

It’s not just risking life and limb. When I left the active-duty Navy for a corporate job, my military-brat wife was momentarily apprehensive because this was the first time in her life that the person who bought her groceries could be fired. (She got over it and took the risk of starting her own counseling practice years later.) 

Aversion to risk can stunt lives. I stutter, and that was a problem until I learned to take risks with my speech instead of avoiding speaking for fear of being embarrassed. This is a big issue for people who stutter: I’ve encountered many stutterers who have allowed their fear of speaking to dictate their careers and social life. 

During the past year, our society’s response to the Covid pandemic seriously messed with our perceptions of risk. The virus was new, unknown and scary. It did not help that the news media served up a steady diet of pandemic porn, scientific discussion was censored and politicians of all stripes behaved badly. 

The result was a tangle of contradictions, such as the odd pronouncements from public health officials that Black Lives Matter demonstrations were okay but outdoor church services were superspreaders. And fully-vaccinated politicians pleaded with everyone to get the shot but signaled their own distrust of the vaccine by continuing to wear masks themselves.

We rely on elected officials to balance risks and benefits, and watched varying perceptions of risk drive public policy. It turned out that some states that imposed draconian lockdowns suffered severe economic and public health consequences but still had higher Covid death rates. Yet states that reopened quickly amid dire predictions from the “experts” often fared better. It’s tempting to conclude that: a) Our leaders may not know what they’re doing; and b) Lots of people are trying to scare us. 

So we’ve been pretty much on our own in deciding how frightened to be, calculating our own risk and figuring out how to behave. 

Because the virus is most deadly to my age group I wore gloves and wiped down food packages in the initial weeks of the pandemic, wore a mask and mostly stayed home (easy enough for a retiree). Getting vaccinated reduced my risk of serious illness from Covid by at least 94%, according to the Centers for Disease Control. Since I’m in excellent health, those odds were good enough for me to gradually resume normal socializing (mostly with other vaccinated seniors) as infection and hospitalization rates declined.

Other folks will have different perceptions of risk, of course. I wonder how many people wore masks while jaywalking across busy streets. 

As the pandemic winds down it’s been interesting to watch people figure things out. Late last month I attended a chamber concert at which masks were optional but the audience — geriatric and presumably vaccinated — virtually all wore masks. Last week I went to the same concert and found the same crowd unmasked. Did they feel safer than they did a few weeks earlier? Or less concerned about being mistaken for Republicans? 

Some people can tolerate less risk than others and I can’t blame anyone for erring on the side of caution. One surprise the pandemic revealed is that educators, as a group, appear to be more risk-averse than the rest of us. Despite overwhelming evidence that children rarely catch or transmit the virus and healthy teachers are at less risk than retail workers, educators were genuinely afraid to return to the classroom even after they jumped the line for the vaccine. Which raises a question: Are these the people we want teaching children to evaluate information and make rational decisions? 

It’s hard to tell what long-term impact the pandemic will have. A recent poll found that 50% of those surveyed believe Covid has permanently changed the way we live in the U.S. Because government officials are quick to impose restrictions and slow to remove them, it’s a good bet that some Covid rules may remain in place for at least as long as we’ve been taking our shoes off at the airport. 

Trust in institutions was declining even before our elected leaders, public health experts and news media fumbled the response to Covid. How will Americans react to the long-term extension of this pandemic or the beginning of the next one? Will everyone continue to obey the authorities, or will more people thumb their noses at them? 

I suspect the country is as divided on risk tolerance as we are on practically everything else. So some of us will demand that our leaders create an environment of zero risk regardless of the economic and human cost. Others will challenge them to weigh risks and benefits to make reasonable tradeoffs for the greater good.

I’m going to keep a mask handy just to be on the safe side. And in case they change the rules again.

I’m registered to receive the Covid-19 vaccine and hope to get my first shot in the next few weeks. The sooner the better. At my advanced age, I can’t imagine NOT getting vaccinated against a disease that is 220 times more likely to kill me than the average 29-year-old. I find it hard to understand why so many people, even in my age group, are more frightened of the vaccine than the virus. 

I am tempted to ask my anti-vax contemporaries if they regret getting the polio vaccine in the 1950s. Polio was a big deal when I was a little kid. The polio pandemic of 1949-52 targeted children from five to nine years old. It killed 3,000 of them in the U.S. and disabled another 21,000. Whenever a child got a cold parents worried that it might be polio. I remember hearing rumors about kids in the neighborhood getting polio and it was pretty scary. Many children who had mild cases of polio (including my late wife) saw a recurrance of symptoms — post-polio syndrome — in middle age.

We saw lots of newspaper photos of kids on crutches and in “iron lung” respirators. It’s probably just as well that cable TV news did not exist in those days. Our news media have given us a solid year of Covid pandemic porn, and one can only imagine the fear-mongering they would have generated about polio. We also dodged a bullet because neither Eisenhower nor Stevenson used polio as a campaign issue in 1952.

Opposition to vaccines has existed since the 18th Century. There was some opposition to the polio vaccine in the 1950s (and some government missteps) but nearly everyone embraced the vaccine when it became available in 1955. The scientists who developed it won the Nobel Prize. Polio cases dropped dramatically and the disease was virtually eliminated in the United States by 1979. Measles followed a similar trajectory: Vaccination virtually eliminated the disease in the U.S. but now it’s back thanks to the anti-vaccination movement. 

I got all my shots as a kid. Any hesitation I might have had about vaccinations was dispelled when I joined the Navy. Everyone got a bunch of shots in basic training, often administered with a high-powered squirt gun that punctured the skin sans needle with a jet of vaccine (which sometimes resulted in bleeding). When we lined up for shots they had an ambulance standing by because there was always someone who fainted (often a big guy). I got more shots when I went overseas. If New Mexico ever gets an outbreak of cholera or bubonic plague I’m good.

My son got a head start on vaccinations. His first baby shots did not “take” because he already had antibodies in his system: Before he was born his mother got a round of vaccinations when the Army sent her family to Germany and another when the Navy sent us to Japan.

The Navy kept my vaccinations up to to date during my years in the reserves. A wallet card that documented my shots came in handy during my annual physical exam when enthusiastic corpsmen were eager to re-vaccinate me. In recent years I’ve added vaccinations for pneumonia and shingles, and I get a flu shot every year.

So I have no hesitation about getting the Covid vaccine. It’s encouraging to see that politicians who were disparaging the vaccine last year now are urging people to take it. I hope, for everyone’s sake, that enough Americans get vaccinated to ultimately eradicate Covid, just as we did with polio. I’m sure the media and politicians can replace it with another national crisis. 

It’s been interesting to watch the presidential stump speeches to blue-collar audiences. President Trump is bragging about jobs. Former Vice President Biden is promising to create union jobs. It’s an important distinction because in 2016 about half of private-sector union members broke with their Democrat leadership and voted for Trump. The Dems want those voters back.

Democrats are pro-union and Republicans are mostly anti-union, but neither party has proposed an agenda that’s fully pro-worker. We need one.

Whenever I see the Labor Day mantra of what unions have accomplished — the 40-hour week, child labor laws, etc. — I wonder what unions have done for workers in this century. American unions are an artifact of the mid-20th Century because that’s when most of our labor laws were written.

Unions have been in decline for decades, mostly in the private sector. Only 6% of private-sector employees now belong to a union vs. 34% of government workers. At this point union influence is mostly political rather than economic. Unions are a major source of contributions to the Democratic party, and public employee unions have made big government its own special-interest lobby.

Private-sector unions have lost members for a variety of reasons: migration of manufacturing jobs, a growing service sector and less interest in unions by younger workers. This is in spite of government policies, even in Republican administrations, to prop them up. It takes only 30% of employees to launch a federally supervised union organizing campaign and election. Employers must share employees’ addresses so that union organizers can contact them at home. (Nice family you’ve got there. Sign this petition.)

Some states have right-to-work laws that allow workers to opt out of unions, but many state governments require employees to join the union as a condition of employment. States and cities often subsidize unions by requiring union labor for government construction projects.

Labor law allows employers to oppose union organizing and they do. They can, and should, conduct employee-information campaigns to counter union organizing so long as they do not violate labor laws in the process. Some smart employers have remained non-union by treating employees decently and offering competitive wages and benefits. Union organizing campaigns are successful about half the time, and companies whose employees vote to unionize in a secret-ballot election deserve what they get.

Employees are not necessarily better off in a union. A captive membership gives unions little incentive to be accountable to workers. Some unions operate like third-world countries and a few even have hereditary leaders. Rank-and-file union members have no voice in the union’s affairs or the political contributions supported by their dues. Every year, about a dozen union officials are convicted of stealing money from their members. If employees don’t like their union it’s nearly impossible for them to decertify it, so they’re stuck. 

Company-by-company union bargaining gives employers an incentive to move to right-to-work states or outsource jobs overseas to curb labor costs for competitive advantage, instead of investing in productivity (which drives higher wages). That’s not good for workers, either.

Public employee unions, on the other hand, have too much power because they own the politicians who are supposed to represent taxpayers. Roughly half of U.S. union members now work for the government. The unchecked power of their unions has driven some cities and states into insolvency, and has been a barrier to education and police reform. One solution may be to apply the federal model — in which wages and benefits are set by statute instead of collective bargaining — to state and local government.

So the challenge is to restore the labor movement’s purpose and balance by empowering workers in the private sector and empowering taxpayers in the public sector.

I believe workers, and the economy, will be better off with robust private-sector unions and a balance of power between labor and management. I spent much of my career in employee and labor communications at Illinois Bell and Western Electric. Even though union negotiations sometimes resulted in strikes (I’ve been through half a dozen of them) the outcome usually was a win for both employees and management. The partnership of unions and management enabled the company to attract a highly qualified and intensely loyal workforce.

Democrats are promising to make the AFL-CIO great again by doubling down on government coercion: ending right-to-work laws and secret-ballot union elections. This will result in more captive union members and give employers even more incentive to outsource jobs. Republicans focus on growing the economy by giving employers more flexibility. While this has been successful in creating jobs and reducing unemployment, it has not changed the balance of power between workers and employers.

What would a pro-worker labor policy look like?

Start by giving rank-and-file union members the same power as stockholders in a corporation: the right to elect their national leaders, and to approve leaders’ pay packages and political contributions. Retain right-to-work laws to allow employees to opt out of union membership and incent unions to compete for members.

Require unions to hold a recertification vote every 8-10 years. Most unions have been in place for decades: At some companies no living employee voted for the union. A decertification vote to kick the union out will make employers unhappy, too, because it opens the door for a tougher union to come in and organize.

If unions are forced to be accountable to their members, perhaps they will become organizations workers are willing to join voluntarily — and government coercion won’t be necessary to sustain union membership.

Consider replacing individual-company labor negotiations with sector bargaining for multiple employers and unions in specific industries, a little like the railroad industry operates. This would give government a bigger role (sorry, Libertarians) but would remove the incentive for employers to avoid unionization for competitive advantage. Sector bargaining could balance the power of labor and management and make union-management relations less adversarial.

Give employees a role in corporate governance through employee stock ownership plans and encourage employee-owned businesses. Consider European-style works councils.

Get unions involved in worker training and retraining. Government training programs have been a dismal failure and unions certainly can do a better job. Imagine a government-subsidized union initiative to train inner-city youth for jobs in manufacturing and construction.

Figure out how to safeguard worker rights in the gig economy. Democratic proposals to transform Uber drivers and freelancers into full-time employees and dragoon them into unions would eliminate the flexibility and freedom these workers value, and ultimately could kill the gig economy. However, I once joined a freelance writers’ union (oxymoronic as that sounds) because it offered a group medical plan. There’s an opportunity for unions to offer services and representation that will be of value to gig workers if they get away from the 20th-Century industrial model.

Oh, and nominate somebody like Mike Rowe for Secretary of Labor.

Neither party has advanced proposals like this (sorry, Mike). But some experts are beginning to study the possibilities and float policy ideas. We won’t hear about labor reform in the 2020 campaign, but maybe someday.