Backgrounder: Marco Trbovich

By Josie Garthwaite

Marco Trbovich
Marco Trbovich at NYU.
Photo: Hazuki Aikawa.

Recently, Marco Trbovich told a University of Notre Dame audience that "the growing influence of the modern media on culture, and their impact on voter opinion" has weakened the union vote. A campaign adviser and union organizer as well as a journalist, Trbovich, 62, has unimpeachable credentials when it comes to commenting on the media, unions, and politics.

The veteran reporter has written for United Press International, Knight-Ridder newspapers, and, in 1980, served as a national correspondent for The Boston Phoenix, covering the Kennedy-Carter primary. Trbovich described his work at the Phoenix as some of his most rewarding. It allowed him "to employ the knowledge gained from two professions: journalism and politics."

Since April 2004, he has worked as labor aide to the Kerry-Edwards campaign. During this time, he has been on leave from the United Steelworkers of America, for whom he serves as Director of Communications and Assistant to the President. When Trbovich was in his twenties, he became a Steelworker, like his grandfathers and father before him. He worked in the open-hearth furnace department of Indiana Harbor Works, a steel-making facility in East Chicago—a job his friend and fellow Steelworker Tom Hargrove described as "literally a living hell." Hargrove, who introduced Trbovich at the Notre Dame lecture, said Trbovich "learned first hand why his father was so adamant about getting good grades in school and going on to college." Enrolling in Indiana University, Trbovich majored in speech and theater, joining the school's first graduate touring company.

Facing the likelihood of being drafted and sent to Vietnam, Trbovich "chose instead to join the Navy as an enlisted man." While stationed in Brooklyn, New York, he began working part-time for a borough weekly where his responsibilities were less than glamorous, limited mostly to writing short pieces from the local police blotter. When he became aware of the extent of local discontent about the expansion of a hospital, however, he pitched the story to the Village Voice, and editor Mary Nichols agreed to give the young journalist a shot. The story ran, catching the eye of editors at the Chicago Free Press, and opening the door to a job with the start-up weekly magazine upon his discharge from the Navy.

Trbovich says he has been "impressed by journalism's capacity for putting a journalist at the cutting edge of social change, a unique position from which to learn the facts that underlie the dynamics of racial conflict and political corruption."

During his service in Brooklyn, Trbovich handled the officer records of John Kerry, then a Navy lieutenant. They found common ground in their opposition to the war, and established a relationship that lasted beyond their service in the Navy. Shortly after both were discharged, Trbovich put his journalism career on hold to work as communications director of Kerry's 1972 congressional campaign.

By this time, Trbovich had been hired by the Detroit Free Press, a Knight-Ridder paper. After Kerry won the Democratic primary, he returned to that job for what Trbovich remembers as his "most fascinating moments in journalism," particularly covering "social conflicts of race and ethnicity in Detroit."

Trbovich is proudly Serbian-American, and has covered issues related to Serbian-American life throughout his journalism career. Serbian-Americans "have a powerful attachment to our past, but we live in a society that does not value this," he told The Christian Science Monitor, in a 1999 interview. "It makes us an anomaly within American culture. It is something enduring in a changing world."

In the 1990s, the world changed dramatically for Serbian-Americans, whose perspective on the war in the Balkans wasn't always aligned with that of mainstream news accounts. Trbovich faulted the U.S. media for what he believed to be the anti-Serbian slant of much coverage of the war in the Balkans.

Still, Trbovich says he has been "impressed by journalism's capacity for putting a journalist at the cutting edge of social change, a unique position from which to learn the facts that underlie the dynamics of racial conflict and political corruption."

Josie Garthwaite is a senior at NYU. She hopes to cover the arts and culture beat for a major daily.

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