Copyright © 1997 by the Boston Phoenix, Inc. All rights reserved.
By Dan Kennedy
Ellie Ford knows the pain of doing without. Because of the UPS strike, the 27-year-old Beacon Hill resident still hasn't received a handpainted frog she'd ordered from Maine. "I think a lot of people are suffering because of it, just like me," Ford told the Boston Globe's Sally Jacobs in a page-one piece last Saturday.
If there was even the tiniest sliver of irony in Ford's voice, Jacobs didn't say so.
To be fair, Jacobs focused more on Luke Richards, who can't get the parts he needs to make artificial limbs, than on Ford's trivial problems. Nevertheless, the story was, in a way, emblematic of how the Globe has covered the showdown between the Teamsters and UPS: devoid of passion, and far removed from the ugly realities of the picket line.
That was especially true on Wednesday, August 6, the day after violence broke out between strikers and police at UPS's Massachusetts facilities. The Globe's much-smaller rival, the Boston Herald, weighed in with aggressive, empty-the-newsroom coverage of the confrontations, while the Globe kept things muted and polite.
15 ARRESTED AS COPS CLASH WITH STRIKING UPS WORKERS, blared the front-page Herald headline, over a wrap-up story written by four (count 'em) reporters. Inside were six photos, including shots of cops facing off against strikers, and of an injured striker being treated by EMTs. Accompanying that was a Bernard Wolfson analysis summing up the principal issues.
By contrast, the Wednesday Globe ran the strike story at the bottom of the Business front, beneath the less-than-inspiring head control of pension plans a central issue. The violence was encapsulated in a few sentences in a sidebar by Diane Lewis, and Richard Kindleberger contributed a piece on the strike's impact on local businesses.
On August 7, while the Herald continued its aggressiveness, the Globe made a partial recovery: the story got better play on the front of Business, and inside Metro/Region was a look at the politicians who are jumping on the Teamsters' bandwagon. But a Charles Stein piece on what the strike might mean to investors seemed almost swinish juxtaposed alongside the fears and hopes of UPS's embattled employees. (The Herald, it should be noted, ran a similar piece the next day.)
Though the Globe might be perceived as the more pro-labor of the two papers, there's little doubt that the blue-collar Herald has more readers who are union members. That's a possible explanation for the Globe's laid-back approach, but it's hardly an excuse.
By week's end, the Globe, with its vastly superior resources, had caught up with the Herald; it has since published several thoughtful pieces that put the strike in political and economic context. But by playing down the initial violence, the Globe missed an extraordinary opportunity to dramatize an issue in which the paper has previously shown considerable interest: the precariousness of working-class existence in the 1990s.