Abstract
Inequality is a difficult subject in political life, signifying an anti-democratic concentration of power that has been allowed to grow more severe, even since the 2008 financial crisis. So it's largely ignored. French economist Thomas Piketty's 2014 breakout book on the subject, Capital in the 21st century, launched a new reassessment, arguing that, because return on capital exceeds income growth, inequality matters, will continue to grow, and cannot be attributed to merit. The resulting wide-spread news attention to the work also serves as a focus for this book's questions regarding how the issue of inequality is mediated. Departing from much of mainstream economic thought, Piketty argued that inequality poses serious problems for society but can be ameliorated by changes in tax policy. Indeed, the growing Bezos et al. billionaire class and glaring social disparities in wealth would strike even the casual observer as cause for alarm, even if downplayed by professional observers. Populist appeals, aided by a right-wing media sphere, have exploited and fed public anxieties, but done little to support redistributive policies—seemingly just the opposite. Surely one must ask how much inequality can grow before the social contract becomes unsustainable. This volume's authors do regard inequality as a serious problem, as they do the news coverage that has functioned as apologist for neo-liberal capitalism. In failing to perform a watchdog function and take policy responses seriously, this has in their view prevented a more serious reckoning.
If what passes for serious economic discourse has paid little attention to inequality, that only reflects the larger disciplinary myopia of the social sciences. Inequality in wealth obviously begets disparities in communicative power, but this crucial linkage between the economic and political spheres has been underplayed in disconnected fields more interested in micro-modeling than macro fault-lines. That goes as well for empirical research in communication, at least in the U.S., which rarely has concerned itself with structural inequality, save perhaps for studies in the 1970s of “knowledge gaps,” thought to be inherently destabilizing for society and in need of closing. This current project follows in the more ideologically-charged spirit of Herman and Chomsky's Propaganda Model, but more directly in the content-based tradition of the Glasgow Media Group, seeking specifically how powerful interests are expressed, naturalized, and reinforced in mediated discourse. Arguing that the field of journalism studies privileges the individual, professional level of news production, they take up a kind of macro emphasis they deem a critical political economy of media.
The authors are designated as “editors,” who as project leaders from both the fields of economics (Grisold) and communication (Preston) have involved other colleagues in the work as chapter contributors, giving this volume greater coherence than found in other more loosely organized edited collections. Background chapters of literature review and economic context are included, but the core of the project is a combination of content and discourse analysis of daily newspapers, chosen from four countries in two linguistic zones: Ireland, UK, Germany, and Austria. A framing-oriented analysis is carried out on a sample of articles referencing Piketty's book, considering how they approach the causes of inequality and treatment recommendations.
The findings indict the media for their blindspots regarding inequality. Even if Piketty was given a generally favorable reception, the social consequences and redistributive policies that followed from his analysis were largely not. The wisdom of free markets is taken for granted, while imposing taxes to manage them is a “political” intervention. Although it's not new that media coverage tends to cover issues episodically and fails to tackle larger systemic forces, the authors regard inequality as a special case, in being so implicated in larger powerful interests and the economics of media themselves. The concentration of commercial media ownership and the cutbacks threatening quality journalism's critical coverage all conspire, they argue, to take the problem of inequality off the table. That's not to mention the right-wing media eco-system, not examined here, that has been even more favorable toward corporate interests and antagonistic toward anything resembling public service journalism. Given their political economy framework, the authors’ recommendations for media reform follow those of McChesney and Pickard: against the privileging of private media ownership and favoring more public support for a kind of journalism that would take inequality seriously.
Readers of this journal will perhaps appreciate the inclusion of national news cultures outside the U.S., albeit within a relatively narrow Western European zone—although I doubt that these patterns would have been much different among large daily U.S. outlets. The selection of the four-country sample, however, appears to be an effort to cast a broader net for content rather than to set up specific explanatory comparisons, defaulting mainly to drawing conclusions about news coverage in general across the sample. I do appreciate the authors’ effort to invigorate the political economy tradition of Herbert Schiller, Peter Golding, Graham Murdoch, and Dallas Smythe, which seems to have taken a back seat to other levels of analysis in the media research of recent years, and to connect it to an empirical analysis of news content. It is sorely needed in documenting the need for a robust independent media sphere capable of tackling the existential threats to democratic life, so many of which appear to stem from growing inequality.