In your Murdoch-free Tuesday media roundup: speculation on the LAT's future, Time magazine gets more paywall-y, everyone wants to work for CJR, Jay Rosen pontificates, and a labor journalism spat.

Michael Raper, a 26-year-old employee of meat processing company Bar S, died this week after falling into a meat grinder. Is there a way that this story could be more horrible? Yes, yes there is:

Wisconsin Democrats have easily fended off a Republican ploy in the state Senate recalls, with the official Dem candidates in each of six races easily defeating Republican activists who also filed in the Democratic primaries. But Republicans have not failed to reap some advantages from the situation.

A whole week of buildup and positioning and raising a "strike fund" and threats and etc. were all for naught; the Village Voice and its union came to terms just two hours before their deadline last night, averting a strike.

After a long and intense battle between union organizers and corporate anti-union forces, workers at the Valley Stream, NY Target store last Friday voted against unionizing. But a few good things did come out of this whole messy process.

Workers at the Target store in Valley Stream, N.Y. voted against joining the United Food and Commercial Workers on Friday, 137-85. Had the measure passed, the Valley Stream location would have been the first Target in the U.S. to be unionized.

Congratulations! The economy added 244,000 jobs last month. So how come you don't have one? Because that's not nearly enough. Not even close.

After last year's deeply embarrassing Shirley Sherrod episode, you'd think people would have learned their lesson about conservative publisher Andrew Breitbart. But no! The University of Missouri has asked a professor to resign thanks to another stupid Breitbart video. Ugh.

"Bloody 'ell!" That ejaculation is likely issuing forth from the lips of celebrity restaurateur Gordon Ramsay—as well as "Come on," and "You donkey!"—as he contemplates the ongoing sexism-related labor dispute that has shut down the fancy NYC restaurant bearing his name since last weekend. "Fuck me!" he is also likely saying. "This is a real Kitchen Nightmare!" he is adding, in all likelihood. "What is this, a real life Hell's Kitchen?" he is wondering aloud, we also believe.

The federal government is intervening in the great labor mural crisis of Maine, where snippy Tea Party Gov. Paul LePage ordered a 36-foot mural of the state's labor history removed the state's Department of Labor because a couple of businessmen didn't like it.

Dane County Judge Maryann Sumi has just blocked — again — Gov. Scott Walker's (R-WI) new law curtailing public employee unions, after the state Republican leadership moved last Friday to circumvent her previous order that blocked the law on procedural grounds. But that's not the end of the discussion, as it appears the state will continue to defy the order.

Five Republican congressmen, including comical troglodyte Louie "Terror Babies" Gohmert, are seeking to bar workers who go on strike—and their families—from getting food stamps. Because why should the children of lousy strikers get food?

The War on Labor Unions in states with new Republican legislatures has opened a new front in Maine, where labor art is the target.

According to sources (mostly from the ever-reliable newswire Twitter), far-too-rich stylist Rachel Zoe is currently in labor with her first child. She has also reportedly already lost all of the baby weight.

"Democrats to End Union Standoff," The Wall Street Journal announced in a headline on Sunday night, citing an interview with Democratic State Senator Mark Miller:

A New York Times/CBS News Poll finds that most Americans oppose eliminating public-secntor unions' collective bargaining rights—and that Americans would rather raise taxes than cut public employee salaries in order to balance state budgets.

This is a video of then-presidential candidate Barack Obama promising a crowd South Carolina that he'd walk a picket line if the right of workers to collectively bargain was being threatened—as is currently happening in Wisconsin:

Wisconsin's new Republican governor, Scott Walker, wants to get his austerity budget rammed through the state's new Republican legislature, and he just supposedly doesn't have the time to deal with public employee unions. So he's introduced a proposal to eliminate workers' collective bargaining rights for wages, pensions, and other benefits while sharply raising their required contributions. And if these employees respond by striking? The proposal allows allows state authorities to fire workers who "participate in an organized action to stop or slow work" or who "are absent for three days without approval of the employer."

The United States already has a major image problem in the Arab world, and a new State Department report on the abuse of foreign workers at U.S. embassies in the region is sure to make it worse.

Andrea Peyser is paid to be a raving, xenophobic tabloid sexpert. Who better to turn to for meta-analysis of economic studies? Have you heard bad things about Wal-Mart destroying small businesses? Andrea has a secret source that disagrees!