(Re)constructing the Pipeline: Workers, Environmentalists and Ideology in Media Coverage of the Keystone XL Pipeline

• In Event: 603 - Section on Labor and Labor Movements Paper Session. Labor Besieged: Repression and Resistance in the Contemporary United States

Abstract

The trade-off between jobs and the environment and divisions between the labor and environmental movements is a common sense assumption and frequent in media accounts of environmental issues. Yet, there is limited empirical evidence that environmental protection universally costs jobs and heavily polluting industries tend to provide few jobs in comparison to their environmental impacts, while placing working class and people of color communities at risk. Thus, how has media discourse made the division between the economy and the environment and in turn workers and environmentalists common sense? The recent Keystone XL pipeline controversy is the latest symbolical conflict between supporters of growth and conservation. This paper uses frame analysis of news articles about the pipeline from The New York Times, The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal to explore the representations of labor and the environment and how hegemony operates in media discourse. My analysis shows how news coverage employed a binary framing that constructed the pipeline as a trade-off between the environment and the economy which made the struggle between workers and corporations with environmentalists seem common sense. Silenced in this dominant discourse is alternative economic options and resistance to Keystone XL from some unions and other social movements.

Author

• Erik Kojola, University of Minnesota