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

Tasini explained this tilt toward coverage of the economic elite in terms of the "growing gap between the experience of working people and those reporting on them" (FAIR 1990, 1). In other words, many of the reporters at the most prestigious news outlets are themselves members of the economic and cultural elite, essentially "white, upper-middle class males," as Tasini put it (FAIR 1990, 1). In his recent book, Lou Dobbs (2006, 84) offered a similar admission that seventy percent of news anchors and correspondents are based in New York City and Washington DC. Jacob Hacker, Paul Pierson, Maria Elizabeth Grobe, and Trudy Lieberman, among others, have suggested that political reporters tend to be socially liberal but economically conservative (Lieberman 2000, 153; Hacker and Pierson 2005, 175; Grobe 2004). In fact, Croteau's 1998 survey of representatives conducted for FAIR concluded that most Washington journalists occupy an elite income group: half of those polled in 1990 had incomes exceeding $100,000 while one-third had incomes exceeding $150,000. Moreover, this same group perceived economic conditions at the time to be much more favorable than did the rest of the population, which seems to have set a rosier tone for their reporting on economic conditions (Croteau 1998, 8-9; Croteau quoted in Cohen 2000, 3; see also Lieberman 2000, 154). (9)

Arguably, then, given their own economic standing in the upper ranges of the income distribution, many reporters have not been completely objective in their reporting of economic issues. For example, Hacker and Pierson examined every story written about the 2001 tax cut in USA Today and the New York Times. They found that only six of the 78 stories in USA Today, and seven of the 126 stories in the Times, covered its distributional effects. By far the major focus was on the politics of the tax cut and not its economic effects (Hacker and Pierson 2005, 177-78).

The focus of media coverage on current financial, corporate, and investment news, rather than the issues of most concern to ordinary middle class Americans, might be explained by the financial pressures on media corporations to cut costs (McChesney 2004). The decline in economic news reporting is part of a larger trend in a decline in the resources devoted to news. Newspapers, in particular, under financial pressures from declining advertising dollars due to competition with the internet and declining circulation, have reduced the resources devoted to news coverage. According to a recent study, large circulation papers reduced the percent of revenues devoted to news coverage by 14.3% during the period 1993 to 1997 compared to the 1988 to 1992 period, and staff reductions, especially in the newsroom, at some newspapers have also been dramatic (Ureneck 1999).

Coverage of economic news, as several scholars have argued, especially news about the declining fortunes of the middle class, is also constrained by these same cost considerations. Gans argued that the middle class crisis has declined as a national media issue because in depth economic news reporting is expensive. In his view, economic news does not fit into a mass production model, being neither cheap to produce nor especially exciting to watch (Gans 2003, 66). Gans described the common journalistic practice of data reduction, a method of relying on pegs or proxies to determine the most newsworthy items (Gans 2003, 53), a practice that effectively guarantees that the topics chosen will be those that can be quickly and immediately covered, rather than investigative reporting of long term economic trends (Gans 2003, 50 ff; see also Moyers 2005, 2). Gans also noted that it is simply cheaper to rely on readily available official versions of economic trends churned out by government agencies than to dig for analyses by unions, academics or think tanks. (10) Croteau's 1998 survey of journalists from major news outlets also found that journalists were much more likely to rely on government or corporate sources for their reporting than on labor representatives or consumer advocates (Croteau 2001 8).