LISTEN TO MIKE ELK
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“There are so many reporters that sellout to Wall Street, that print Wall Street’s talking points, that do all the bidding of Wall Street. The thing that people said to me is, ‘By helping these workers you showed that you were too much on the side of workers.’ Sure, there’s a thousand reporters that are sellouts to Wall Street, but how about three or four that are sellouts to working people. I’m perfectly fine with people calling me a sellout to the working class. I’m perfectly fine with people saying, ‘Mike Elk is totally beholden to the interests of somebody making $17,000 a year that can’t feed their kids.’ I’m fine with that.”
The Huffington Post, which describes itself as “The Internet Newspaper,” doesn’t have a full-time labor reporter. Mike Elk, a third-generation union organizer and labor journalist, helped fill that void. Elk produced more than 100 posts for the Huffington Post, without pay. Then, last month, he was “fired.” Sitting at home in the Mt. Pleasant neighborhood of D.C., Elk said, “Only in 2011 do people get fired from unpaid jobs. But I was fired as a contributor [to] the Huffington Post for helping a group of 200 construction workers break into a conference of mortgage bankers.”
Shortly after his “firing,” Elk wrote, “The [construction] workers demanded to know why Pulte Group’s vice chairwoman was leading the summit, and how her company grabbed a $900 million government bailout made up of funds that came from the Worker, Homeownership and Business Assistance Act of 2009. That bill was intended to create jobs and extend benefits to unemployed workers, but union workers said no jobs were created with this money.”
“Was helping union workers disrupt a conference of bankers an ethical thing for a journalist to do? This is a subject for debate. In my view, however, it’s unethical for publications like the Huffington Post to not have a single full-time labor reporter, and for corporate media to routinely ignore workers’ struggles. This reality forces freelance labor journalists like myself to pull stunts in order to hold corporations accountable and get workers’ voices heard.”
Earlier this month, Huffington Post was bought by AOL. Robert Parry of Consortiumnews.com noted, “U.S. progressive media has had a tough few weeks. First, Keith Olberman, the pioneer for liberal programming during MSNBC’s evening hours, was sent packing. Then, Arianna Huffington allowed AOL to subsume her Huffington Post into AOL’s right-of-center content for the price tag of $315 million. Leftist bloggers who had provided free content to Huffington Post, enabling it to become a valuable property, found themselves quite literally sold out, with Huffington pocketing $18 million while making clear that she won’t battle for the liberal banner inside AOL.”
Elk first noticed the Huffington Post’s corporate drift this past summer when “Arianna Huffington played a big role in promoting the movie ‘Waiting for Superman.’ She offered free screenings to everybody who wrote for the website, all thousand or so people. This was just atrocious since this is a film that was not even considered factually accurate enough to be nominated for the Academy Awards, that basically bashes teachers’ unions as being the cause of all the problems of education.”
“The second thing that troubled me was when [the Huffington Post] got heavily behind the Rally for Sanity, the Jon Stewart rally. Basically the message of the Jon Stewart rally was that both sides have gone too far. That aggressive in your face tactics, civil disobedience, things like that we shouldn’t engage in as a country. [Stewart] bashed a number of left-wing voices, like Code Pink, who’s done some very aggressive work on the war. I thought this was an awful thing because… American progressive change has never occurred without movements of mass civil disobedience. The type of civil disobedience that Jon Stewart was bashing…Whether it’s the Flint Sit-down Strike or shutting down whole cities in the south during the civil rights movement, we’ve always had to fight through being able to shut down things and being able to literally not engage in the type of polite discussion that Jon Stewart and other people wanted to engage in.”
Elk wrote, “The Huffington Post has helped redefine journalistic rules and ethics. Now, with actions like my dismissal… it’s signaling that it is abandoning its guerilla roots and adopting a more mainstream, corporate style of objective journalism. This strand of corporate journalism was unable to expose unnecessary wars and looming economic catastrophes. It has failed us time and again. In contrast, my unconventional actions helped expose a nearly $1 billion scandal.”
Elk said, “[Right now], you have the biggest attacks on public employees, unions, happening in the country. [Last week], the governor of Wisconsin said he would use the National Guard to stop public employees from striking. We haven’t seen that since the 1960s, since when Dr. Martin Luther King was shot in Memphis, that the National Guard is called out during a strike… And there’s very little coverage in the media. You don’t see coverage on the mainstream news channels of labor stories. You don’t see coverage of factory closings. You don’t see coverage of atrocious violations of labor rights. 300,000 workers are prevented every year from joining a union by illegal union busting tactics, such as firing, and you never see anything on the news about that.”
Regarding his role in assisting 200 construction workers disrupt the conference of mortgage bankers, Elk said, “As a labor journalist, I felt it was ethical to do because otherwise the story would have been ignored and my job is to help people have their voices be heard.”
* Correction: Originally, the story said, “300,000 workers were prevented every year from joining a union by illegal union busting tactics.” The correct number is 30,000.