• Town Talk

It’s amazing how quickly a catchphrase can start echoing through the media. Sometimes the source is popular culture: remember “Where’s the beef?” from the 1980s? Sometimes it’s a bit more insidious.

Right now, for example, what’s filtering through the Colorado media is the distorted talking point that proposed federal legislation dealing with organized labor, the Employee Free Choice Act (EFCA), would eliminate the right of workers to hold a secret-ballot vote on organizing their workplaces.

Although the highest-profile opposition has come from conservative voices, the pros and cons of the EFCA have generated considerable debate on both ends of the political spectrum. 

Factually misrepresented

However, what Colorado newspaper readers and radio listeners are being told about the EFCA by news and opinion sources factually misrepresents the legislation.

For an issue as serious as the EFCA, readers and listeners should demand serious media coverage and editorial discussion. They haven’t been getting it. 

What they have been getting from some of the state’s largest newspapers and radio stations are assertions that the EFCA “would eliminate the secret ballot in union-organizing elections,” that it “takes away workers’ right for a private vote on unions,” or that it “effectively eliminates the secret ballot vote among workers when forming a union.”

The House Committee on Education and Labor has described the claim that “[t]he Employee Free Choice Act abolishes the National Labor Relations Board’s ‘secret ballot’ election process” as a “myth.” The committee states on its Web site: “The Employee Free Choice Act would make that choice — whether to use the NLRB election process or majority sign-up — a majority choice of the employees, not the employer.”

As The New York Times reported, “Business groups have attacked the legislation because it would take away employers’ right to insist on holding a secret-ballot election to determine whether workers favored unionization.”

That’s pretty clear, right? Apparently the word hasn’t reached some of the media in Colorado, where a variety of news reports and editorial comments have parroted the inaccurate claim that EFCA would strip workers of the right to a secret-ballot union organizing election.

Errors in print, on air

As of Jan. 26, Colorado Media Matters had documented eight instances in which a newspaper report or a talk radio host had conveyed the falsehood. Offenders included The Denver Post, The Daily Sentinel of Grand Junction, The Gazette of Colorado Springs, Mike Rosen of KOA, and his colleague Dan Caplis of sister station KHOW.  

The Post in particular has perpetuated this mischaracterization, which is consistent with the anti-labor crusade its editorial writers appeared to have launched with the Nov. 4, 2007, front-page editorial attacking Gov. Bill Ritter as “a toady to labor bosses” and “a bag man for unions and special interests.”

In three separate January pieces — a Jan. 6 editorial, a Jan. 9 news article and a Jan. 25 column by editorial page editor Dan Haley — the Post repeated some form of the distortion that EFCA would eliminate secret-ballot votes for union organizing. News consumers also should watch for when the legislation is described simply as “union card check” legislation. That’s taken verbatim from the term that the Republican Party has slapped on the EFCA and that Fox News has used as its own shorthand description. Haley’s Jan. 25 Post column also used the phrase.

Serious issues demand serious debate. When you read or hear Colorado media outlets distorting the description of legislation such as the EFCA, call the people in charge and ask for an explanation. 

Bill Menezes is editorial director of Colorado Media Matters. Colorado Media Matters is a Web-based, not-for-profit, 501(c)(3) progressive research and information center dedicated to comprehensively monitoring, analyzing and correcting conservative misinformation in the Colorado media. Visit colorado.mediamatters.org.

Add a new comment... Spammers: links do not work and our site gets monitored for spam daily and your comments will be removed -- please do not spam our site!

Your Name:

Your Email:

Title:

Comments:

Please copy the characters from this image into the box below. All characters are either numbers 1-9 (not zero) or letters (upper and lowercase). If you cannot read this image, you can click it to try a different image (most browsers). Otherwise, submit the page anyway and try again.

Image Text: