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Introduction
The news media play a powerful role in informing citizens’ judgments of the impact of government activity. This is especially true in relation to evaluations of the economy (Boydstun, Highton, and Linn 2018; Hetherington 1996)—a massive and multidimensional phenomenon in regards to which direct experience may be of limited relevance (Mutz 1992). Voters’ electoral choices are, in turn, profoundly influenced by their assessments of the state of the economy (Duch and Stevenson 2006; Lewis-Beck 1988). But what is the nature of the economic reality presented by the media? Scholars have made some progress on the issue, exploring the news media’s differential responsiveness to levels and changes of various economic parameters (Soroka 2006; 2012; Soroka, Stecula, and Wlezien 2015). What we know little about, however, is whose material welfare the economic news reflects. In particular, how responsive is economic reporting to developments affecting different income groups? When voters turn to the news media for an assessment of economic performance, does the signal that they receive reflect the fortunes of most households or of those located at particular points in the income distribution—whether the middle, the bottom, or the top?
We argue in this paper that the economic news in the United States has, over the last 40 years, painted a portrait of the economy that strongly and disproportionately tracks the welfare of the very rich. Analyzing a vast, original dataset of news articles in 32 high-circulation US newspapers over this period, we uncover clear evidence that reporting on the US economy is descriptively class-biased. 1 Specifically, the evaluative content of economic news becomes more positive (negative) in periods in which the incomes of the very rich grow (shrink) and is largely uncorrelated with change in the incomes of less well-off Americans, once growth in incomes at the top is taken into account. Put simply, good economic news tracks, above all, the fortunes of the most affluent.
We then seek to understand how this pattern arises. Rather than reflecting a conscious journalistic bias in favor of the interests of the very rich, class-biased economic news, we argue, stems largely from the media’s focus on charting economic performance in the aggregate. Central to our account is the breakdown of the relationship between aggregate economic growth and...