You may not have noticed it, but American coal miners have, for more than six months, waged one of the largest and most dramatic strikes in recent history. That's right, American miners. But their strike has been so thoroughly buried by the media that it's possible for even a diligent news-watcher to believe that only the Soviet Union--or Poland--still has an assertive working class.

America's working-class majority has never received publicity in proportion to its numbers. It enjoyed a brief modishness following its "discovery" by the media in 1969. This discovery was in many ways parallel to the "discovery" of poverty six years earlier: A previously invisible group was unveiled, with great fanfare, on the covers of the national newsmagazines, examined in television specials and seized upon by academics. For a few years at least, the working class enjoyed the attention of Hollywood ("The Deer Hunter," "Blue Collar") and of journalists and academics who produced dozens of books and articles on the "neglected majority."

Then, in the 1980s, the working class dropped from sight. Hollywood lost interest, and on television, aside from "Roseanne" and "Married, With Children," there is almost nothing to remind us that not every family is supported by a doctor-lawyer team. In the newspapers, there has been a steady decline of labor coverage, leaving the labor reporting that does go on increasingly in the hands of the business section. In academia, as a professor friend reports to me, "class is out of style."

So it is possible for a middle-class person today to read the papers, watch television, even go to college without suspecting that America has any inhabitants other than white-collar professionals and, of course, the thoroughly demonized "black underclass."

The producers of public-affairs talk shows do not blush to serve up four upper-income professionals to ponder the minimum wage or the need for a national health program. Working-class people are likely to cross the screen only as witnesses to crimes or sports events, never as commentators or--even when their own lives are under discussion--as "experts."