FORTUNE 500 COMPANIES
“Once, Fortune
500 companies
were the bread
and butter of business coverage. Since the
2008 financial collapse,
however, the preoccupation
with Wall Street has pushed these companies aside. As Jesse
Eisinger of ProPublica observed to
me in
an e-mail,
journalists
‘don't adequately
cover how corporations
keep their wages down, treat their employees
in general, fight unions, lobby for their corporate-
needs, arrive at decisions to pay their top executives,
or dominate their markets. We don't hear
about the GM or VW scandals until
after they break. (Once they do, we
get good coverage, but that's
archeology, not detective work.) Where
is the coverage of Boeing. 3M, Du- pont, FedEx or CVS?
Energy? Insurance? Trucking? Construction?’
keep their wages down, treat their employees
in general, fight unions, lobby for their corporate-
needs, arrive at decisions to pay their top executives,
or dominate their markets. We don't hear
about the GM or VW scandals until
after they break. (Once they do, we
get good coverage, but that's
archeology, not detective work.) Where
is the coverage of Boeing. 3M, Du- pont, FedEx or CVS?
Energy? Insurance? Trucking? Construction?’
“ . . . The activities of unions could be examined as well.”
Massing, Michael, ‘How to Cover the One Percent,’ The New
York Review, January 14, 2016, pp: 74-76.
