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.

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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.

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