Lyric Opera strikers play for passersby. Click to hear the music.    Video by consideredsources.com (CC BY-SA 2.0)

“Chicago Lyric Opera Musicians Walk Out as Season Opens”  (NY Times). The headline can be simple, but it’s a story with many layers, and when you pry them apart, they tell you a lot about America.

It’s in one part a typical labor struggle. Management claims they have no choice but to cut salary and the number of performances — more middle class professionals straddling regular employment and the gig economy. Art student friends take note: This story is also about the place of the arts and artists in America, with the peculiarities of labor-management conflict in the non-profit world. And, as always, there is the way the story in each of its parts is told to the rest of us by the news media, which are also struggling with deep cuts to staffing and quality, also with more journalists pushed down into the precariat.

It is as well a story about how power gets to write its own story. Let’s look at the Tribune’s reporting, since, among the papers that covered the strike, it is the most detailed.

Bias in reporting can be subtle We are taught to value the objective reporting style of the big dailies, which model fairness and impartiality. We’re in an age where sophisticated critiques of that style and its assumptions are becoming familiar, but it still has its power to distract us from questioning the “facts” we see so carefully and densely reported. But the most difficult to see distortions are not the “alternative facts” and “fake news” of right-wing discourse,  but the facts that are left out, the voices that are not heard. I value the traditional newswriting style and teach it, but I also teach questioning it.

Lyric musicians picketing in front of the opera house. Photo courtesy of Jack Zimmerman.

Headline framing First let’s look at those innocent headlines. News headlines may seem to boil the story down to its main point. But headlines frame the story, and in framing it they give the story an interpretation. Sometimes, you can see bias in the interpretation when you compare headlines in different newspapers for the same story. Look at the headlines for the Lyric Opera strike:

Chicago Lyric Opera Musicians Walk Out as Season Opens (NY Times)

Lyric Opera musicians go on strike, threatening opera season (Washington Post and Washington Times, both using AP)

Musicians strike silences opening notes of Lyric Opera season (Chicago Sun-Times)

“Declining audiences, subscription revenues lead to Lyric Opera strike” (Chicago Tribune)

Whose point of view do you see in the Tribune headline?

The headlines in the other papers are saying, our reporter’s story is that the musicians are striking. But the Tribune’s headline tells a different story, echoing the Lyric management’s framing.  For Lyric management and the Tribune, as we see when we read further, the real story is that declining revenue has forced cuts that the musicians have no choice but to accept. It’s societal, it’s structural. The money just isn’t there. There is no alternative. (One reader pointed out that the Post headline blames the musicians for possible management cancellation of the season.)

The Tribune story may be written in the objective and impartial style we expect from the best newspapers. But one of the most important sources of bias in reporting is privileging one source over others, and the Tribune article is a good example of how sourcing can spread bias through a wealth of factual details “objectively” presented. (I have to say here I respect the two Tribune writers, whose work I follow, learn from, recommend to students. But still, the Tribune coverage of the strike, in other articles also, is biased.)

Siegfried is here to support the strikers — management dragons, beware! Photo: consideredsources.com, (CC BY-SA 2.0)

The sources The Tribune gives eight paragraphs to quotes from its two spokespersons from the Lyric Opera management, three to a written statement by the orchestra. The reporters speak to the Lyric’s General Director Anthony Freud and to Board Chairman David Ormesher; but while we hear their voices, the reporters do not speak to any of the musicians or even a union representative. Yes, this difference may seem a bit superficial, but the imbalance between management’s claims and musicians’ response is not.

To be fair, on the Tribune website there is a video with cool visuals and comments by cellist William Cernota, who is allowed to make a brief but sharp argument. But his argument doesn’t appear in the text either on the web or in print and, more important, it is left unexamined by the reporters.

Cernota: “We’ve taken very modest 1% increases and we’ve given our all to this company, and they have used those gains we’ve provided to blow up a $24 million budget with none of that coming back to us, and no explanation for where the money is going.”

The orchestra’s statements return to that $24 million, and if you talk to one of the musicians on the picket line, chances are they will also bring up the $24 million.  Isn’t it a serious claim? Yet it is not mentioned in the Tribune article.

It’s a pitiful irony that the reporters didn’t talk to Cernota or take his claims back to the Lyric’s management with some questions. Ironic, because if you change Cernota’s figures, he could be talking not about the orchestra, but about the Tribune’s own struggling newsroom. (And the Tribune newsroom had just recently unionized.) And, hey, this is not just about musicians and reporters — it’s about America too, isn’t it? You don’t have to be a Marxist to ask, How many of us “give our all,” see our employers make huge gains, and see none of the gain coming back to us?

Whose data? The Tribune article goes on to give data that clearly comes from management, without questioning it,  without looking at context, and without asking for rejoinders from the musicians. The other newspapers reporting on the strike, though with less information, do the same. The Tribune also goes farther — they examine the Lyric’s tax forms and financial statements. Good journalism so far, but here too the Tribune doesn’t ask the musicians for their interpretation of management’s data. The reporters also don’t seem to realize that the 990 forms are also management statements and so can not to be taken as unimpeachable fact. (The articles about Trump’s fraudulent tax returns came out the week before the Tribune article.)

The most common bias in “objective reporting” is going first — and often second and last — to the “authorities” for comments.  It is the norm for journalists to go to the “responsible spokespersons” for comments but marginalize or leave out the voices of the people most affected by the story. That means  present or former government officials, business leaders, think tank “experts funded by billionaires, sometimes even academics, mostly tied into those elite networks.

And in labor disputes, as here, that means going first and last to management, where knowledge and PR resources are concentrated, privileging and further empowering them. Why talk to the workers? What could they know? Maybe go to the workers for some feature angle about their tragic struggles against necessity and the laws of the market. Though newspapers only do that for the strikes the elites really worry about, not strikes by the expendable culture workers.

If you want to see any in-depth reporting on the demands of striking workers, or what their lives are like, you have to go to what is left of the labor press or to leftist or activist publications.

This is all normal, newsroom routine, dictated not by personal bias so therefore “objective.” Bias is built into the routine.

The master-frame of the Tribune article is clear in this sentence:  “The larger societal factor driving the dispute remains a declining audience for top notch, high-ticket opera productions.” Everybody knows that, no? Managers of non-profits always say these things with regret, but we can see in the reporting how this assumption empowers them in their conflicts with their employees.

Future soloist outside the Lyric Opera. Photo courtesy of Jack Zimmerman.

Is it true? Must orchestra musicians, museum employees, students and faculty just helplessly listen while management repeats their mantra, We do feel your pain, but there just isn’t the money. We can’t give you students that tuition remission, we can’t pay you orchestra musicians, museum employees, artists a decent professional salary. Or, more often, we have no choice but to cut your health care and pensions, cut your salaries, lay you off. And we also hear the same refrain from the political class: Government just doesn’t have the money for free, universal healthcare, for free public college, for affordable housing. … The market rules, there is no alternative.

The musicians’ counter-claims
This is all such “conventional wisdom” that newspapers can report it without readers questioning it. Yet the Lyric musicians question it, and the Tribune doesn’t quote them or even mention their claims.

Director Freud says, Our contributions are down, we’re dealing with “donor fatigue.” The musicians say, The other big Chicago arts institutions aren’t suffering from donor fatigue: not the Art Institute, the MCA, the Joffrey Ballet. And, musicians say, according to Giving USA,  gifts to the arts have been increasing. Are they wrong?

Management says, We’ve had declining opera ticket sales. Musicians say, By the Lyric’s own reporting, ticket sales [including for musicals — ed.] are up from $25.3 million in 2012 to $25.95 million projected for 2018, with an 84% fill rate in the house. Further, say the musicians, other opera companies are able to increase musicians’ compensation without cutting positions: The Metropolitan Opera, the San Francisco Opera, the Washington National Opera orchestras. (I just read NY Times stories on Metropolitan Opera strikes and lockouts from 1966 on. Management used that same master frame about decline, yet the musicians emerged with better pay and conditions. Somehow the Met survived, and, say the Lyric musicians, recently won an improved contract.)

The musicians also have an explanation for the overall revenue decline, one they emphasize but that the Tribune and the other dailies also leave out: mismanagement and executive salary bloat. The Tribune reports the musicians’ salaries, but doesn’t quote their complaint about the salary gains of General Director Freud:

[Freud] saw a compensation increase of 18% from 2014 to 2017 – a raise of 16% in 2016 alone, right after the Orchestra musicians agreed to a cost-neutral contract with cuts to health care. And now he is leading the charge to gut the Orchestra. His demanded salary cuts alone would cost each musician in the Orchestra $6,000; Freud, with his $800,000 annual salary, gets paid that much every three days.

and

Lyric exploded its budget in recent years, from $60.4 million in 2012 to $84.5 million in 2017 … but the orchestra saw none of that $24m increase. To the contrary, the Orchestra’s share of the budget has decreased steadily, from 14.6% in 2012 to 11.9% in 2017.

Maybe corporate media is just too obedient to question a respectable CEO’s high salary. But isn’t it a perverse incentive when management salaries go up while the revenue is sinking? It’s not Freud’s fault — he blames the musicians for expecting professional salaries. He also blames opera — it’s just not popular enough and not enough of a money-maker, so the Lyric has to produce (gasp!) musicals.  (If only they could put on fewer operas and more musicals — it’s a lot easier to herd “Cats” than Valkyries.)

Freud also claims that the donors are demanding the musicians accept the cuts — and won’t continue giving if the Lyric can’t prove it is financially disciplined by disciplining its musicians. Maybe that’s true about the donors. Lyric directors like Lester Crown didn’t make their billions by giving decent pay to us oompa loompas; they party with Freud, not with flautists.

Who believes tax returns are objective facts? 
What is the real story of the Lyric’s finances? Maybe Freud is right, but it’s hard to say because, while the 990 forms are publicly accessible, as required by the IRS, they don’t break down the expenses. “Where is that $24 million going?” The Tribune story doesn’t mention that $24 million, though it goes into valuable detail about Lyric finances. The problem with the details is that we can’t test the musicians’ claims that the financial problems are due to mismanagement, because all we have are the tax forms and Lyric financial statements. What are reporters to do? It would take a major investigative project to go deeper and even if they had the resources of investigative journalism at its post-Watergate height, reporters couldn’t dive deep into every story. But what they can do, at least, is report strikers’ claims in detail, just as they do management’s claims.

Should non-profits open their books?
Unequal power is reflected in unequal access to information. One of the most radical demands a union could make is, “Open the books!” It seems even more reasonable in a non-profit that is, like the Lyric, close to being a public trust. But we never see that demand because it is too fundamental a challenge to employer power. Management insists the musicians have to sacrifice, but while the musicians’ compensation is open to the world, management can keep its spending secret.

Opera musicians in a historic strike
“Open the books!” The Metropolitan Opera orchestra strike of 1966 was  a turning point labor victory which led to substantial improvements in the lives of musicians in other orchestras also. I remember one musician telling me they embarrassed management with that demand — my father was a violist in the Met orchestra and intensely active on the orchestra committee. This is my personal point of reference and feeling for the Lyric strike. I felt prompted to do some reading and call up my memories of the Met strike, in which the musicians’ creative tactics blindsided the Met management.

September 15, 1969. Locked out musicians of the Metropolitan Opera play for the public outside the opera house, a tactic used by the Lyric strikers also. The violist in the lower right is Harold Elitzik.

In the ’60s the newly militant orchestra went around their local union, formed their own orchestra association and hired their own labor lawyers. The musicians were furious at what they regarded as a sellout when in 1961 the union pushed them into arbitration with Arthur Goldberg, then Kennedy’s Secretary of Labor, as arbitrator. So they pushed the union aside, voting down a five-year contract the union was pressuring them to accept in 1964. And they hired labor lawyers Herman Gray and Philip Steinman, brilliant tacticians who encouraged their militancy.

You heard then too that familiar master frame about arts institutions — how the Met was operating with a deficit and there was simply no money for raises:  “Every orchestra, opera or ballet company is a losing proposition from the day it is founded,” and “cultural support money is becoming scarce,” and  “America is fast approaching the outer limits of private support for the performing arts … orchestras in total crisis. …”

The Met’s musicians called b.s., just as the Lyric musicians are doing today.

During the negotiations, Gray staked out the position that bargaining with a nonprofit institution such as the Met should be a cooperative enterprise, citing as an example his own experience on the board of a social-work agency. “When I negotiate a contract for management,” he said, “I put our budget on the table and say, ‘Let’s talk about your requests in terms of these figures.’ Now, the Metropolitan insists that our demands are ridiculously high. But their published financial statement is a farce, and I notice that when we press them they never say they can’t afford a settlement.” (Opera News, June 1970)

But instead of striking then, they bided their time. They let their contract expire and continued working for two-and-a-half years without one. If they had gone on strike in 1964, the Met could have waited them out and even canceled a season. Timing was critical: They struck in September 1966, when the Met was scheduled to open its palatial, new opera house in Lincoln Center, an opening night “gala” that would have the first lady, heads of state, New York billionaires and high society in attendance. It would have been much harder for the Met to cancel the first season in the new opera house. The musicians went on strike in August, refusing to rehearse any but the opening night’s opera, the premiere of Samuel Barber’s “Antony and Cleopatra.” They performed on opening night but then threatened to stay out after that night until they had a contract.

In the second intermission of the opening night performance, General Manager Rudolf Bing came on stage to announce the strike had been settled. It was a huge victory for the musicians. They became the highest paid orchestra in the world, according to union president Max Aron, with their base pay increasing from $250 to $355/week, pay for the weekly radio broadcasts, a longer season, and a two-week vacation going up to four in two years. But more important than pay for the lives of the musicians and their families, they had won their demand to reduce the number of performances from seven each week to six, then five in the contract’s final year. In addition to those seven performances — each weekday night and two on Saturday, and sometimes eight, when they played a benefit on Sundays — musicians rehearsed every weekday morning and afternoon. While growing up, I rarely saw my father during the season. By 1966, I was off at graduate school, but I could imagine the impact the shorter work-week had on the musicians’ families, and their health.

When working people win big, it can raise the hopes and determination of working people elsewhere. Soon other orchestras were demanding better pay and conditions. General Manager Rudolf Bing, outmaneuvered, said he would never again negotiate “with a gun to his head.”

When the big arts institutions cry poverty … it’s a “Tale of Two Tunes”

“Tale of Two Cities” is part of the language of inequality now, one city for the rich and one for the rest of us. The story of the Lyric Opera Strike is like that; a friend calls it a “Tale of Two Tunes.”

My union organizer uncle used to say, “You have to call their bluff. If you don’t, there will be no end to their demands for concessions.”

But is the master frame a bluff? Are conditions changing to the point where artists and musicians just have to suck it up? Maybe, but it is curious how the directors always seem to be increasing their salaries in these dark times, and it is fair to wonder whether they keep their books closed just as the obligatory exercise of power … or whether they do need to hide mismanagement and waste.

James, 13, cellist, teaching the Lyric’s management to value musicians, at the rally for the Lyric strikers, Daley Center, October 13. Photo: consideredsources.com (CC BY-SA 2.0).

When a big arts institution cries poverty, my heart does truly feel a twinge. But then I remember that the elite arts institutions are a necessary institution of the super-rich, providing them with a unique stage on which to legitimize their place in society and their entitlement to their wealth and power. It’s absurd to say that Chicago can’t afford to pay its classical musicians a decent salary. Chicago is a global city with one of the greatest concentrations of wealth in the country, a playground for billionaires and multi-millionaires, many on the boards of the Lyric, the Art Institute, the Field Museum — those people who just don’t want to pay their share of taxes.

Even without progressive taxation, can Chicago support its musicians? Our city is “broke” when it comes to paying for the arts and for schools, but somehow our mayors always seem to come up with millions when it’s for a stadium for DePaul, or when they want to give away billions of potential revenue in a sweet deal for banker friends.

So let’s be skeptical and reframe the headlines when we hear there’s no money for the arts. The true frame is that it’s not about money, it’s about power. Whether there’s money for musicians and artists depends on power, so they have to learn how to find allies and build it and exercise it.
—Paul Elitzik

This in after I wrote this piece: “Lyric Opera of Chicago said in a statement Saturday evening that it had reached a “multi-year labor deal” with musicians who went on strike Tuesday. …“Subject to ratification is the key term,” said Kathleen Brauer, a Lyric Opera Orchestra violinist and union representative.”—Chicago Tribune  Note that the union negotiators may have agreed, but the strike is not over until the musicians vote on the contract offer Sunday, 10/15. I’ll add a note when I learn the outcome.

A few more notes

Is the union correct that other opera companies are increasing compensation for their musicians? The Tribune could find out more easily than I can. I wish they would.

 

After I published this article, a reader sent me a link to the Michael Cooper’s New York Times article on the Met’s 2018 contract, ratified in September: “For the First Time, the Met Will Perform Opera on Sundays.”  The Met management decided to increase revenue rather than cut costs. The bargain was that musicians would trade their Sunday day off — Sunday performances would be far better attended than weekday performances —  and in exchange get a pay raise  of around eight percent over the three-year contract, increased pension benefits, and other improvements. The musicians would also pay more into their health insurance.  My apologies to reporter Michael Cooper for missing this article — I had written that I could only find the contract details in the Amsterdam News (a bit different there).

A fascinating and suggestive article on why the wealthy need the institutions of high culture: Paul DiMaggio studied the origins of the Boston Symphony and Boston Fine Arts Museum in Boston politics, when the rule of traditional elites were challenged by the rise of the upstart Irish politicians. Philanthropy and creation of institutions of high culture served to legitimize the old elite’s status and entitlement to rule. (DiMaggio, P. 1982. Cultural entrepreneurship in nineteenth-century Boston: The creation of an organizational base for high culture in America. Media, Cult. Soc. 4:33-50, accessible here.)

 

How power gets to write its own story. I borrowed that phrase from Jay Rosen.

 

Tale of Two Tunes was suggested to me by Prof. John Hagedorn, who writes on gangs, race, the very criminal justice system at www.gangresearch.net.

 

oompa loompas. This may be imprecise — Director Freud might consider some of the musicians as oompah loompas.

 

I always wonder when a company claims it’s in crisis just at the time of contract negotiations, whether it was, like many crises, a planned crisis. If I were writing the novel, management would be talking to the big donors two years before the contract expires. Management would tell them, hey, could you cut your donations for the next two years by half or more? Then we’ll tell everyone we’re in a crisis, in steep revenue decline, so there is no alternative to steep cuts in the musicians’ salaries. But just put that money you were going to give us aside, give it to us after we crush the union. We’ll have these neat IRS 990 forms that will then convince the Tribune and everyone else that THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE.

 

Some interesting sources, besides the ones I linked to: 

 

Slipped Disk. Look beyond the home page for articles on the strike, representing the musicians’ p o v in detail.

 

Chris Jones, “The strike at Lyric Opera: Should arts organizations be more like airlines?” Chicago Tribune, October 13, 2018. Accurate analogy, but the master frame is, here too, assumed.

 

And the NY Times was “newspaper of record” for the Metropolitan Opera’s 1966 strike, 1969 lockout, and the bitter lockout in 1980. I noticed without surprise that the reporters offered many quotes from management, the union president, some from the lawyers. The musicians own voices? Not heard.