eprintid: 10183845
rev_number: 9
eprint_status: archive
userid: 699
dir: disk0/10/18/38/45
datestamp: 2024-01-10 13:14:58
lastmod: 2024-01-10 13:14:58
status_changed: 2024-01-10 13:14:58
type: book_section
metadata_visibility: show
sword_depositor: 699
creators_name: Matthews, J Scott
creators_name: Hicks, Timothy
creators_name: Jacobs, Alan M
title: The News Media and the Politics of Inequality in Advanced Democracies
ispublished: pub
divisions: UCL
divisions: B03
divisions: C03
divisions: F30
keywords: News media; economy; accountability; 
public opinion; sentiment analysis
note: This version is the version of record. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher’s terms and conditions.
abstract: What has allowed inequalities in material resources to mount in advanced democracies? This chapter considers the role of media reporting on the economy in weakening accountability mechanisms that might otherwise have incentivized governments to pursue more equal outcomes. Building on prior work on the United States, we investigate how journalistic depictions of the economy relate to real distributional developments across OECD countries. Using sentiment analysis of economic news content, we demonstrate that the evaluative content of the economic news strongly and disproportionately tracks the fortunes of the very rich and that good (bad) economic news is more common in periods of rising (falling) income shares at the top. We then propose and test an explanation in which pro-rich biases in news tone arise from a journalistic focus on the performance of the economy in the aggregate, while aggregate growth is itself positively correlated with relative gains for the rich. The chapter’s findings suggest that the democratic politics of inequality may be shaped in important ways by the skewed nature of the informational environment within which citizens form economic evaluations.
date: 2023
date_type: published
publisher: Cambridge University Press
official_url: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009428682.014
oa_status: green
full_text_type: pub
language: eng
primo: open
primo_central: open_green
verified: verified_manual
elements_id: 2133199
doi: 10.1017/9781009428682.014
isbn_13: 9781009428682
lyricists_name: Hicks, Timothy
lyricists_id: TMHIC39
actors_name: Hicks, Timothy
actors_id: TMHIC39
actors_role: owner
full_text_status: public
series: SSRC Anxieties of Democracy
place_of_pub: Cambridge,UK
pagerange: 245-275
book_title: Unequal Democracies: Public Policy, Responsiveness, and Redistribution in an Era of Rising Economic Inequality
editors_name: Lupu, Noam
editors_name: Pontusson, Jonas
citation:        Matthews, J Scott;    Hicks, Timothy;    Jacobs, Alan M;      (2023)    The News Media and the Politics of Inequality in Advanced Democracies.                    In: Lupu, Noam and Pontusson, Jonas, (eds.) Unequal Democracies: Public Policy, Responsiveness, and Redistribution in an Era of Rising Economic Inequality. (pp. 245-275).   Cambridge University Press: Cambridge,UK.       Green open access   
 
document_url: https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10183845/1/MatthewsEtAl2023.pdf