American prosperity and the "race to the bottom:" why won't the media ask the right questions?

Journal of Economic Issues, March, 2008 by Dell P. Champlin, Janet T. Knoedler

Moreover, media interest in the problem of growing inequality and the middle class squeeze, even during the 1980s, has largely been confined to its salience as a political issue. The work of Donald Bartlett and James Steele, well-known investigative reporters formerly of the Philadelphia Inquirer, focused on the deleterious role of Reagan era government policy in fomenting the decline of the middle class (Barlett and Steele 1992, 5 ff.). In 1992, candidate Clinton made the "middle class squeeze" a major issue in his campaign (Beatty 1994; Ifill 1992). In later campaigns, the focus of democratic candidates on health care was driven, in part, by its identification as a middle class issue. Conservative pundits and policymakers reacted to the literature on the middle class crisis and worsening income distribution by viewing it, with some justification, as an attack on conservative economic policies. Their approach for the past 25 years has been to deny the existence of a middle class crisis, to minimize the extent of growing inequality, and to accuse liberals of deliberately distorting statistics (Bartlett 2005; Foster-Bey 2004; Hassett 2006; Luskin 2005). For example, Alan Reynolds of the Cato Institute, who writes frequently for the Wall Street Journal, concludes in a recent paper, "[a]side from stock option windfalls during the late-1990s stock-market boom, there is little evidence of a significant or sustained increase in the inequality of U.S. incomes, wages, consumption, or wealth over the past 20 years" (Reynolds 2007, 1; see also, Burtless 2007).

However, in the face of the continued and pronounced changes in income and class mobility in recent years, the release of new data such as the Federal Reserve's Survey of Consumer Finances, and the publication of a growing number of studies in academic journals and by public interest groups, the subject has recently resurfaced in major media outlets (Cf. Bucks, Kennickell, and Moore 2006). A quick search of newspaper indexes on inequality showed approximately twice as many articles published on this topic between 2002 and 2007 as compared to the 1997 to 2002 period. (4) To list a few of the more noteworthy articles, the New York Times published a series of articles on the problems of class in the United States in 2005 (Scott and Leonhardt 2005) and regularly reports on income inequality either in articles or in editorials (cf. Brooks 2006). (5) The Wall Street Journal includes coverage of growing income inequality and regularly covers the political aspects of inequality (Cf. Wessel 2005; Schuman 2007; Ip 2006).

An article by Blaine Harden in The Washington Post on June 22, 2006, reported on a Brookings Institution study of the decline in middle income neighborhoods in 100 metropolitan areas, and Steven Pearlstein produced two short articles on the problems of the middle class (March 8, 2006 and May 30, 2007). The Los Angeles Times routinely covers the issue of inequality, even though the articles are predominantly local in focus. Indeed, after the November 2006 election, the debate over the existence of the problem of income inequality finally appeared to be over when both President Bush and the Chair of the Federal Reserve Board, Ben Bernanke, acknowledged the problem of worsening income distribution, and their statements were duly covered in the Wall Street Journal (Ip and McKinnon 2007; Wessel 2007).