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