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American Prosperity and the "Race to the Bottom:" Why Won't the Media Ask the Right Questions? Author(s): Dell P. Champlin and Janet T. Knoedler Source: Journal of Economic Issues, Vol. 42, No. 1 (Mar., 2008), pp. 133-151Published by: Association for Evolutionary EconomicsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25511291Accessed: 04-09-2015 08:59 UTC

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IPJ JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC ISSUES Jul Vol. XLI1 No. 1 March 2008

American Prosperity and the "Race to the Bottom:"

Why won't the Media ask the right questions?

Dell P. Champlin and Janet T. Knoedler

ABSTRACT: Media coverage of income inequality and the economic plight of

the middle class fails to analyze the long-term effects of growing inequality and

to consider possible solutions. The article examines the literature on media

coverage of income inequality and the middle class, and then examines how

three competing models, the neoclassical economic model, the propaganda

model, and the institutionalist model,explain the inadequate coverage of the

effects and solutions.

Keywords: Media coverage of economics, media coverage of the middle class, media coverage and institutionalism

/fl Classification Codes. B52, L82, D63

The problem of growing income inequality in the United States has become more serious over the past thirty years. A substantial number of books, scholarly papers,

reports by think tanks, government data, and recently, special feature stories in

national newspapers and magazines have been published on this issue.1 Yet, for the

most part, the main topics have been whether or not there is growing inequality and

how much inequality is there. We have yet to move to the next, and in our view, more important phase: what are the effects of income inequality on the well-being of

our economy and its participants, and what can be done about it?

In this paper we suggest that a major obstacle to moving the problem of

inequality from the "discovery" phase to the "action" phase is- the way inequality has

been covered in the national media. Before inequality can be addressed, it must first

be viewed as a serious, national problem that can and should be resolved. The media

plays a unique and vital role in this regard. Indeed, the responsibility of the media to

inform and educate the public on important issues has long been recognized as vital

to a democracy (Croteau and Hoynes 2001; Fallows 1996). In practice, however, the

Dell Champlin is a retired Professor of Economics, Eastern Illinois University and Janet Knoedler is an Associate

Professor of Economics at Bucknell University.

133 ?2008, Journal of Economic Issues



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134 Dell P- C/iamplin and Janet T Knoedler

performance of the media in pursuit of this public interest responsibility has fallen short of this ideal. The national media has been criticized in recent years for its overzealousness in the increased pursuit of tabloid stories, or, as in the case of the

War in Iraq, a distinct lack of zealousness in the pursuit of the salient information about the links between the 9/11 terrorists and Iraq, or the extent of the development of Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) in Iraq. In the latter case, according to

many observers, the media devoted an insufficient amount of time and effort to the

"discovery" phase - an identification and analysis of the problem; and went too

quickly and fervently to coverage of the calls for action. Al Gore's latest book, The

Assault on Reason makes the argument that the media pay insufficient attention to

factual reporting and analysis of important issues and, in so doing, undermine our

ability to find the best solutions (Gore 2007).2 In our view, media coverage of income

inequality and the declining fortunes of the American middle class is a conspicuous example of the trends Gore describes. Despite a recent increase in reporting on this

issue, the discussion has yet to move beyond a mere statement of the problem.

We begin with a brief survey of the debate over income inequality and the

shrinking middle class in the United States as covered by the national media. In the

second section, we review recent literature on the performance of the media in

covering economic news. In the third section, we contrast three economic models of

the media to assess its failure to explain the causes of growing wealth and income

inequality as well as its failure to cover calls for redress of these problems. We

conclude with a brief observation about the importance of the media in informing the

electorate if we are to bring about progressive change.

Media Coverage of the Middle Class

The term "middle class" is commonly used by scholars, politicians, and reporters to

discuss economic and cultural issues, but the latter two groups typically decline to

offer clear definitions of what constitutes the middle class. Moreover, much

confusion reigns in scholarly and policy circles about who resides in the middle class:

as Steven Pressman recently noted, "theory does not and cannot tell us who counts as

middle class" (Pressman 2007, 182). Given our focus in this paper on the media's

coverage of the economic fortunes of the middle class, specifically, the growing income inequality evidenced in large part by the declining fortunes of the middle

class, we will use Pressman's economic definition of the middle class: "being middle

class means having a middle-class standard of living or having an income that is

somewhere in the middle of the income distribution" (Pressman 2007, 183; see also

Peterson 1994, 53 ff.; Zweig 2000, 20 ff.).3

Despite this lack of clarity about who is in the American middle class, the

middle class has often been a popular media topic. Following World War II, news

coverage of the U.S. economy often centered on the expanding and "newly 'affluent'

middle class" (Yarrow 2006, 68). In the 1980s it was the decline of the middle class -

at least the blue collar middle class - that caught the media's attention. Popular

books such as The Deindustrialization of America and America: What went Wrong



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American Prosperity and the "Race to the Bottom" 135

documented the loss of highly paid manufacturing jobs and their replacement by lower paid service sector jobs with few benefits and less job security (Bluestone and

Harrison 1982; Bartlett and Steele 1992). A 1983 article by Robert Kuttner in the Atlantic Monthly entitled, "The Declining Middle," in fact created a major media sensation and generated a serious discussion in the mainstream media on the loss of

middle class incomes for thousands of workers. By the early 1990s, more books had been published on the topic. However, during the late 1990s and early 2000s, the middle class crisis all but disappeared from the news. Even though the number of secure jobs with health and pension benefits continued to decline, the media

trumpeted the economic boom and the "new" economy (Cohen 2000, 4). With the terror attacks of 2001 and the Wars in Iraq and Afghanistan following so closely on

the heels of the dotcom bust, the media seemed to lose interest in inequality. 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 o{ 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 o{ growing



136 DeK P- Champlin and Janet T Knoedler

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). However, in spite of the modest increase in coverage, the emphasis in most cases

is limited to a simple reporting of the existence of growing inequality and middle class decline. Where causes are identified, the blame is typically attributed to factors such as rising globalization, insufficient educational attainment, or rapid technological change, factors that carry an air of inevitability and are presumed to be outside the control of policymakers.6 In addition, media coverage of substantive studies of

growing inequality and middle class struggles is balanced by the continuing effort of some conservatives to deny or minimize the problem. Conservative populist Lou

Dobbs now includes a segment titled the "War on the Middle Class" on his nightly news program on CNN, where he typically assigns the blame to illegal immigrants or

venal politicians (Dobbs 2006; Auletta 2006). In these circles, the increased attention to inequality and the middle class squeeze has not ushered in a notable move toward

an analysis of real issues and solutions, but merely the use of "inequality" as a vehicle

for ratings or a political talking point. .For example, the Wall Street Journal

summarized the increased attention to inequality as follows:

Until January, President Bush seldom acknowledged the widening gap between the rich and the middle class. Then, in a speech, he declared: "I know some of our citizens worry about the fact that our dynamic

economy is leaving working people behind . . . Income inequality is

real." He has raised the subject several times since.

This isn't a sudden change in Mr. Bush's economic philosophy, but

rather a change in tactics forced by the changing political environment,

say current and former administration officials and outsiders in touch

with the White House.

Top White House economic officials still don't consider today's

inequality - the growing share of income going to those at the top

- an

inherently bad thing. . . . (Ip and McKinnon 2007, A7)



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In short, despite the renewed interest in the topic of growing inequality and the

shrinking middle class, these recent media reports have not moved beyond basic

reporting. Historically, the role of the media has been not to merely identify problems but also to explore and evaluate solutions (cf. Fallows 1996). In fact, it

might be concluded that recent coverage has actually reduced the possibility of finding solutions, as the problem of inequality becomes the subject of strategic and overblown

political rhetoric that is left unchallenged by a passive and uncurious press during the ever lengthening presidential campaign (cf. Krugman, June 8, 2007). Factual and

meaningful discourse on this now 30 year trend in the U.S. economy seems more

elusive than ever.

Our survey of recent news coverage about the declining fortunes of the U.S.

middle class indicates three themes that are cited again and again: (1) these trends are

due to inevitable and impersonal historical forces such as technological change or

globalization, and the failure of the poor and middle class to adapt by acquiring appropriate skills (cf. Wessel 2005; Ip and McKinnon 2007; Blinder 2006); (2) the effect of globalization on the middle class has been exacerbated by bad government policy on trade, outsourcing and immigration (cf. Dobbs 2006, Buchanan 1998); and

(3) these trends are due to the distortion of tax and other policies in favor of the rich at the expense of the middle class and the poor (cf. Krugman 2007). Very occasionally, an article will comment that the trends toward greater inequality and a

shrinking middle class will contribute to sharper class divisions in the future or affect the democratic process (cf. Cassidy 1995; Bernasek 2006). For the most part, the

media simply presents the three themes, unchallenged, with little substantive debate.

As a consequence, the public is confronted with a menu of three flavors from which

to choose with no further information on the accuracy of the analysis, the significance of the problem, the desirability of reversing this 30 year trend, or even the possibility of doing so. In other words, the "problem" is not that the media is not covering the

middle class. The "problem" is that the middle class decline is easily explained and

not viewed as a problem that can be solved.

Analyses of News Coverage

We now turn to examine the question of why the media has failed to explore the facts

behind the declining middle class and the bleak future that may await most of its current members in 21st century America. Scholarly literature on the news media

offers several credible explanations for the news media's inadequate coverage of the

causes and consequences of middle class decline: (1) the media focus on a "master narrative" that reflects the existing cultural hierarchies, namely the views of the

cultural and economic elite; (2) the media is itself part of the wealthy elite and thus does not "see" the problems of the declining middle; (3) more complex news coverage of the middle class decline is too costly and unexciting for mainstream media outlets; and (4) media coverage of middle class aspirations and needs is increasingly tilted toward conservative explanations.



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138 DeM P- Champlin and Janet T Knoedler

Beginning with the first two points, several analysts have noted that the "master

narrative"7 chosen by the mainstream media will reflect existing cultural hierarchies.

The dominant point of view is that of the economic and culturally powerful within our society and not that of the struggling middle class. In his classic content analysis of the news provided by the three major broadcast networks, Deciding What's News, Herbert Gans stated, "[a] simple summary, then . . . would suggest that news is about

the economic, political, social and cultural hierarchies we call nation and society. For

the most part, the news reports on those at or near the top of the hierarchy and on

those, particularly at the bottom, who threaten them, to an audience, most of whom

are located in the vast middle range between top and bottom" (1979, 284). Moreover, according to Gans, Eric Alterman, Deepa Kumar (2004), and others,

economic news in particular is designed for the investor class rather than for ordinary citizens. Alterman (2003) observed in his analysis of media coverage of the 1990s

economy that journalists were lavish in their praise of the stock market during that

decade, while they ignored the fact that most Americans participated only marginally if at all.8 Cohen cited a Newsweek cover story from July 1999 that proclaimed "Everyone's Getting Rich but Me!" (Cohen 2000, 1), that went on to report that "the income gap remains a thorny problem, but wealth is increasingly spread out as

businesses give workers more of a stake" (Cohen 2000, 1-2). Diana Henriques,

business writer for the New York Times, noted the striking increase in the number of

business reporters for the top fifty newspaper markets and national business

publications from 4,200 in 1988 to 12,000 in 2000. In her view, these reporters have become "entwined" with the wealthy people that they cover and thus write mainly for

that investor class rather than for ordinary citizens (Henriques 2000, 22).

In addition, Gans and others have noted that much more reporting is done

about the management side of the workplace than about the workers (Gans 2003, 64;

see also McChesney 2004, 71). This tilt toward the economic elite and away from the

average worker was documented in a 1990 study for Fairness and Accuracy in

Reporting (FAIR) by Jonathan Tasini, in which he reported the following: (1) nightly news programs in 1989 directed only 2.3 percent of their coverage to workers' issues

and only 1.2 percent of network time to unions; (2) workers are frequently presented in the form of "person-in-the-street" interviews about matters of popular culture but

rarely interviewed about their own work lives; (3) the reduced television coverage of

workers has been accompanied by an increase in corporate-oriented programs; and (4)

the labor beat has been replaced by the "workplace" beat at many daily newspapers. Diana Kendall also identified workers and the middle class in her 2005 study of

media content as being "clearly under-represented groups" (2005, 139, 170 ff.).

Christopher Martin analyzed many labor stories reported by mainstream media

outlets during the 1990s and found a clear pro-business, pro-consumer bias that was

often critical of labor (2004, 266-267). 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



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140 Deli P. Champlin and Janet T. Knoedler

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). Thus, the "master narrative" constructed by the government or corporate

sources is rarely challenged by competing views. It is important to note in passing

that, over the past seven years, this official narrative has been framed by the Bush

administration, which includes some of the most accomplished spinners and

rhetoricians seen in modern politics.11 The assumption by reporters that official press

releases require less research and investigation than other sources is certainly not

valid. Jacob Hacker and Paul Pierson offer a glaring example in their recent book,

Off-Center: The Republican Revolution and the Erosion of American Democracy, where they describe how George W. Bush's press team sold the 2003 tax cut by bringing in

business lobbyists to don "hard hats ? i.e., to impersonate what one leaked

congressional leadership report memo called "REAL WORKER types" (Hacker and Pierson 2005, 58). Distinctions between economic news, official information and

political advertising were completely eliminated when the Bush administration

actually developed and issued fake news reports on Social Security and the Medicare

prescription drug plans to be broadcast on local news stations (Klinenberg 2007).12 The fourth explanation of these trends centers on the growth of politically

conservative media. Several authors and watchdog groups assert that the lack of

media attention to the problems of the middle class is the direct outcome of an

expanding presence of overtly right wing media such as talk radio and Fox News.

Trudy Lieberman has recently argued that conservative think tanks have used

"aggressive strategies" (2000, 3) to push their ideological premises and policy stances

into mainstream media outlets. As a result, the right wing has put such ideas as the

flat tax, medical savings accounts, and Social Security privatization into mainstream

discourse, despite these theories all having once been seen as eccentric policy schemes

of the extreme right (see also Cohen 2000, 3-4). In Lieberman's view, "conservative

groups have learned to boil down their messages to fit the new model of sound bite

journalism, leaving the details for the weighty studies and policy analyses disseminated in more elite venues" (Lieberman 2000, 9). To quote Lieberman on this point,

"Through sheer perseverance and an unrelenting commitment to ideology, right-wing

organizations have successfully used the press to further their agenda of laissez-faire

economics, deregulation, lower taxes, redistributing resources from poor to rich,

privatizing everything from schools to street cleaning, and ? above all ? delegitimizing

government" (Lieberman 2000, 14). Similarly, in Peddling Prosperity, Paul Krugman (1994) tried to decipher the lessons of the Reagan-Bush years for economists. He

argued that "policy entrepreneurs" who promise simple solutions, as opposed to the

"professors" who prefer to qualify their cautious explanations, will be used by most

mainstream media outlets to explain the state of the economy. Krugman went on to

argue that in the late 70s and 80s, most of these "policy entrepreneurs" were intent on

promoting conservative economic ideas by asserting that free market, supply-side

policies would "get the magic back" (Krugman 1994, 9, 12). Arguably, the right wing has figured out how to "play" the media.



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Andrew Yarrow (2006) argues that this tendency of the media to "peddle prosperity," as Krugman puts it, owes its origin to the rise of economic news reporting

during the Cold War. The message of the free market and American prosperity became part of the propaganda war against the Soviet Union. Patriotism and

economics were closely linked, "... the messages conveyed in the press and elsewhere

about what were valued and core qualities of Americanness' shifted to economic

virtues, such as the country's high, rising, and broadly diffused standard of living as well as its economic dynamism and growth" (Yarrow 2006, 59).13 It is not hard to see the same dynamic at the flag-waving Fox News network and other conservative outlets

where criticisms of America of any kind are viewed as unpatriotic (Cf. Champlin and Knoedler 2006).

Moreover, according to Hacker and Pierson, the expanding conservative media

empire, headed by Fox News and talk radio, has been willing to coordinate their

message with the right wing think tanks and key right wing political operatives, thus

amplifying these conservative economic messages (Hacker and Pierson 2005, 180; see

also Moyers 2005). In sum, while the observations and studies of economic news coverage discussed

in this section make valid points, we believe that institutional economics can provide a more complete picture. In the following section, we examine alternative economic

models of the media and evaluate their usefulness for understanding the failure of the news media to cover one of the most important issues of the current century

- the

growth of inequality and the decline of the middle class.14

Alternative Models of the Media Industry

In this section, we contrast three competing models to explain the coverage of the

causes and consequence of middle class decline. We begin with the view from

orthodox economics that consumer sovereignty ultimately determines the content of

the news. From this vantage point, the news media is a business offering a product for sale to consumers and advertisers. We then move to the propaganda model

associated with Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky (1988). In this view, the news is not a commodity but a tool designed to "manufacture consent." Finally, we

formulate an institutionalist model that views scant media coverage of economic news

in general and the middle class crisis in particular as part of a larger failure of the news media, and indeed, all business enterprises, to place service to the public interest

above service to pecuniary goals, and also explains the compliance of consumers of

media.

The neoclassical model offers some useful insights. Assuming that markets are

effectively competitive, consumer sovereignty does, in theory, determine the content

of media coverage (Mullainathan and Shleifer 2002; Hamilton 2004, 160-161; Swinnen and Franchen 2005, 40). In fact, if consumer sovereignty plays a role, then

the 22% increase in Lou Dobbs' ratings since the inception of his "War on the Middle Class" segment may indicate a growing interest in this subject, among his

viewers at least (Auletta 2006, 68): as Ken Auletta put it recently, "CNN seems to



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142 Ddl P Champlin and Janet T. Knoedler

have adopted a we're on your side' stance as a way to boost ratings" (Auletta 2006,

68). In other words, if consumers demand information on the plight of the middle

class, media providers would accordingly supply such content. In a similar vein,

Hamilton explained that political and government news that might benefit the

general public is often unread or unviewed by consumers due to the "small chance that an individual's political action can influence events" (Hamilton 2004, 2) ? a

form of "rational ignorance," in his view.

This notion of effective competition may at first blush seem hopelessly at odds with the unprecedented concentration and conglomeration of today's media.

Nonetheless, many commentators and policy makers argue that the vast and

expanding array of media products ranging from hundreds of cable channels available via satellite to the expansion of on-line access to U.S. and international newspapers,

journals, and magazines, to the growing presence of the so-called blogosphere, give consumers more choice than ever.15 In other words, a substantial amount of news is

still produced and delivered to consumers, but the content of that news is of economic necessity heavily driven by ratings and advertisers (Hamilton 2004, 101 ff.).

Ratings spikes during events like the alleged kidnapping of Natalee Holloway and the Michael Jackson trial will lead news producers to expand that kind of coverage; ratings dips when they turn to serious news convince them that consumers do not want that

kind of coverage. Moreover, the twin pressures, on the one hand from advertisers to

capture the elusive 18 to 35 year-old male demographic or the 18 to 49 year-old female demographic (Hamilton 2004, 71, 188-189) and on the other hand from

corporate CEOs to squeeze the same profits from their news divisions as from their

theme parks and movie divisions, further diminish any incentive to cover the less

lurid and less profitable plight of the middle class. In this context, therefore, consumer choice seems to have determined content: consumers of mainstream media

seem to prefer the juicy details of celebrity trials or "softer" news over the dry analysis

of long-term economic trends (Hamilton 2004, 71 ff.; 238-239),16 whereas consumers

who want serious news can surf the web to find that more eclectic content.

However, even seen within the neoclassical context, this expansion of consumer

"choice" is illusory because the high degree of media concentration ensures that

ultimately, only a few corporate heads determine the content of most media. Thus,

the oligopolistic markets that have been created in most media sectors from this

concentration have led to such standard oligopoly outcomes as restriction of

consumer choice. To list but a few examples ? "local" news segments produced by

Sinclair's corporate headquarters (Rogers 2003), elimination of the less profitable

investigative journalism and international coverage (McChesney 1999, 51 ff.; Croteau

and Hoynes 2001), and "competition" along safer, imitative lines, as seen with the

passive coverage by most media outlets of the lead-up to the Iraq war by the

mainstream media. In point of fact, the concentration and conglomeratization of the

modern media industry has had a perverse effect on news reporting (McChesney

2004; Bagdikian 2004; Fenton 2000). Submerged into media empires, news providers are now under pressure to yield the same rates of profit as the entertainment divisions

also owned by the media empires (Bagdikian 2004). Thus, ABC News must earn the



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same rate of profit as Disney World while CNN must earn the same rate of profit as

Warner Records (see Ureneck 1999; Bagdikian 2004). In contrast to this neoclassical model, a propaganda model of the media has

been articulated by Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky, and extended by others

(Parenti 1993; Jackson and Stanfield 2004). In their view, the media serves "to mobilize support for the special interests that dominate the state and private activity,"

in effect, to "manufacture consent" (Hermann and Chomsky 1988, xi).17 This

propaganda model is seen by its proponents as being more insidious in a democratic

society, in contrast to the official organs of propaganda in Putin's Russia or

Ahmadinejad's Iran. Rather than official, and obvious, forms of censorship that

openly suppress freedom of consumer choice, Herman and Chomsky believe that the

censorship in our society remains hidden from view. In particular, they argue that

many reporters come to internalize the principal values and judgments of the elite

corporate and government interests who run the system as the means to their

professional success: as they state, ". . . in the media, as in other major institutions,

those who do not display the requisite values and perspectives will be regarded as

'irresponsible,' 'ideological,' or otherwise aberrant . . . .; [t]hose who adapt, perhaps

quite honestly, will then be free to express themselves with little managerial control, and they will be able to assert, accurately, that they perceive no pressures to

conform" (Herman and Chomsky 1988, 304). Within the confines of the media, as seen by Hermann and Chomsky, five

official filters are asserted to be used by the moneyed interests in society to control the

terms and content of media discourse: (1) the conglomeration and profit expectations

of the major media; (2) the reliance on corporate advertising for revenue; (3) the

tendency of the media to use official sources rather than their own reporting; (4)

"flak' as a means of disciplining the media; and (5) anticommunism as a national

religion and control mechanism" (Hermann and Chomsky 1988, 2).

We believe that the elements of this propaganda model have some merit. The

central story line of the rich getting richer and the rest falling behind, would highlight rather than conceal those who control money and power in our society, and thus is

filtered out. However, we agree with such critics of the propaganda model as Cynthia

Kaufman, who observes that the propaganda model is overly simplistic and does not

address the important questions of whether "consumers of media are always duped by it" and "why

... so many people, radicals included, love to consume commercial

media" (Kaufman 2003, 256). In our view, the propaganda model does not sufficiently explain the role of

media consumers in buying these messages. In fact, both the neoclassical model and

the propaganda model fall short in offering insights into the demand side. We offer, instead, an institutionalist model that blends the useful elements of both of the above

models and assigns an active role to the consumer of media within our modern

society. Within the institutionalist mode, the modern news corporation is primarily a

pecuniary enterprise, and thus no longer organized around the public service interests

as media enterprises were structured by journalistic practices and government

regulations a century ago (Klinenberg 2007, 17 ff.). The institutionalist model,



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144 De^ P Champlin and Janet T. Knoedler

moreover, also situates the modern media in an evolutionary context that helps to

explain why consumers, seemingly, no longer demand that the public interest be served by the media companies that use the public airwaves.

Drawing on Veblen's analysis of business enterprise, we argued in an earlier

paper that the pecuniary interests that operate media corporations advance

profitability at the expense of the public interest (Champlin and Knoedler 2002). The business interests within media enterprise, as with any other enterprise, dominate the

public interests. Thus, media institutions tend to sympathize with ? indeed, to be

captured by ? the dominant pecuniary interests, in particular because they are now

mostly owned by multi-media corporations whose primary interest is selling things.

Moreover, seen through a Veblenian analysis of the dominance of business, or

pecuniary, interests over the public interest, as has been documented by many

sources, the concentrated ownership of media has led over time to an increased

supply of infotainment and a decreased supply of serious news, international news,

and investigative journalism (Champlin and Knoedler 2002; Jackson and Stanfield

2004). In service to these pecuniary interests, the quantity and content of the news

supplied by the mainstream press has been tilted toward news that is sensationalistic,

ratings-enhancing, and cheaply produced.

While this analysis of the production side of media may be consistent with the

propaganda model, we believe that the institutionalist analysis allows for a deeper

analysis of the trend toward conglomeration. The conglomeration of the media over

the past two decades is fully consistent with Veblen's analysis in The Theory of Business

Enterprise that the captains of business will seek to control the interstices of industrial

operations to increase their profits, not to serve the public need for media content

(Veblen 1978, 8 ff.). Moreover, if they can increase profits by providing no useful

media content at all, they will do so.

Put differently, the ongoing consolidation of media corporations into multi

media conglomerations has rendered most news operations as mere adjuncts to larger

entertainment enterprises, whose main business is to make money, not to produce

media content that is useful to the citizenry. Veblen's theory of sabotage is also

relevant here in the sense that he described it ? a conscientious withdrawal of

efficiency, with efficiency defined here as providing useful information to the public

(Champlin and Knoedler 2006). The control of the interstices of all aspects of media

by media conglomerations ?

large media enterprises that control both production and

distribution of all manner of content ? means that the public interest function once

assigned to news divisions as a quid pro quo for the networks' use of the public airwaves has been largely abandoned in favor of the more salacious or entertaining

content that seems to garner ratings. Put succinctly, vast enterprises that could use

their resources to investigate the many political and economic complexities of the

declining middle class, in order to inform and perhaps to mobilize them into a more

active citizenry, instead find it more profitable to entertain and amuse them.

This focus on the profitability of ratings also, perhaps, explains the particular

form for coverage of middle class issues such as those showcased by Lou Dobbs where he wages "an unending battle against the corporate imperialists, whom he blames for



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an untenable increase in illegal immigration, a destabilization of the middle class, and

an erosion of national sovereignty" (Pappu 2007, 44). The personality journalism of the ilk presented by celebrity hosts like Bill O'Reilly, Lou Dobbs, and Glenn Beck reflects the darker side of the conglomeratized media simply catering to consumer

demand: these hosts mainly offer opinions, sharply and entertainingly expressed, be

they about the latest blond in peril or about illegal immigrants, and seem to increase

ratings at the expense of information (cf. Lemann 2006, 32 ff.; Auletta 2006). To turn to the question of consumer demand, consumers of media, increasingly

enculturated to emulate the dominant pecuniary classes, look to media for titillation

and entertainment rather than information. This point seems self-evident from the

ratings spikes when cable news channels cover salacious news. The relevant question,

from an institutionalist standpoint is: why are consumers seemingly content with the

media that is provided to them? Why do most consumers acquiesce to this

abandonment of the public interest function of news? We believe that there are two

related explanations.

First, consumers of the "news" do not have the opportunity to make rational

choices of media products; as in a standard oligopoly model, consumers find their

choices restricted by media conglomerates. But given the special nature of the media

and the proven ability of these large media conglomerates to mold the very culture,

and thus the "demand" ? for its own products, consumers are not really making

rational choices of infotainment over important economic news. As Michael Sandel

recently observed, "markets are good at giving consumers what they want. They aren't

so good at providing citizens what they need to be citizens in a democracy" (quoted in

Ureneck 1999, 19). Second, because consumers in a pecuniary society are

enculturated to emulate the leisure class, consumers absorb a distorted view of what is

in the collective interest. The drive toward emulation that, as Veblen argued, is the

most powerful economic motive, prevents the underlying population from "opposing the leisure class in class conflict" (Dugger 2000, 39) and instead leaves them wanting to be like the dominant leisure class. Media representations of the moneyed classes

have become the primary means by which less affluent consumers come into contact

with the leisure class (Schor 1999). Thus, from an institutionalist view, consumers are

more likely to prefer mainstream media content that presents the world they seek to

emulate rather than the world in which they actually live. Hence, they are in turn

more likely to be drawn to the kind of news that focuses on the interests of the elite, primarily entertainment, business and military news, rather than news that challenges their hopes and dreams of ascending to the upper classes. News that instead focused

clearly on the causes and consequences of the declining fortunes of the middle class

over the past thirty years would instead tend to indicate to the vast majority of news

consumers that their dreams of emulation will ultimately be frustrated.

To sum up, the neoclassical model that consumers get the kind of news they desire is often touted by the right wing because it serves their interests. Yet it is clear that right wing views are more often heard (McChesney 1999; Bagdikian 2004; Lieberman 2000) and that the marketplace of ideas is dysfunctional when monopoly interests, profitability, and right wing co-option are at work in slanting the "news"



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146 Dell P. Champlin and Janet T Knoedler

toward this happy master narrative. Add to this mixture a consuming public that is

caught up in a perpetual race of emulation of the leisure classes. The vast majority of

consumers of news are not choosing the product they consume, and the vast majority

of news operations are not producing the product most needed by their consumers.

Middle Class America?

In the 2004 best-seller, What's the Matter with Kansas?, Thomas Frank wondered why so many middle and lower income Americans vote against their own economic best

interest.

. . . [T]he country seems more like a panorama of madness and

delusion worthy of Hieronymous Bosch: of sturdy blue-collar patriots reciting the Pledge while they strangle their own life chances; of small farmers proudly voting themselves off the land; of devoted family men

carefully seeing to it that their children will never be able to afford

college or proper health care; of working-class guys in midwestern cities

cheering as they deliver up a landslide for a candidate whose policies will end their way of life, will transform their region into a "rust belt," will strike people like them blows from which they will never recover

(10).

Frank suggests that the answer may be found in a cultural backlash. In this paper, we

suggest that another explanation may be the news media's failure to provide adequate

economic news and a rigorous examination of economic policies. While coverage of

many issues by the mainstream media is inadequate, we believe that the neglect of the

middle class crisis is particularly significant. The trends adversely affecting the middle

class that began in the late 1970s and early 1980s have not abated, but rather

accelerated. The smug assurances of conservatives and neoliberals that market forces,

education and retraining will take care of those left behind have proven not only

overly optimistic but ineffective. As Harold Meyerson, columnist for the Washington

Post, put it, "nothing short of a radical reordering of our economy will suffice if we're

to save our beleaguered middle class majority" (March 22, 2006). The question now

is whether the press will decide to cover the recovery of the middle class or its demise.

While the broad majority of Americans face real economic struggles with debt, access to health care, and an uncertain economic future, the media presents us with

their stylized version of the middle class American worried about the vague and

gathering threat of moral and cultural decay and fearful of the inexorable march of

progress through globalization.18 In contrast, for most of the 20th century, popular

culture and the media gave us the middle class American whose hard work and

determination fueled the economic prosperity o{ the nation as a whole. The white

collar professional or middle manager and the blue collar factory worker represented

the two segments of a broad middle class that was "one of the great social

achievements of all time" (Beatty 1994). When polled, the vast majority of Americans




still consider themselves middle class (Zweig 2000; Pressman 2007, 183) even though they have been transformed from the drivers of economic prosperity to the victims of it.

Notes

1. See, for example, the New York Times series in 2005, published as Class Matters, Times Books, 2005; Wessel 2005.

2. Gore describes the exhaustive discussions, analyses and debates that take place over the "serial obsessions that periodically take over the airwaves for weeks at a time" (2007, 3). Endless debates and analyses occur on the minutiae of celebrity news or gossip. Intense scrutiny is devoted to O.J. Simpson, Jon Benet Ramsey, and Michael Jackson. Much less analysis, fact-checking, and debate takes place on public policy issues with far-reaching consequences such as war and national security, the environment, or the influence of wealth. Gore notes that media coverage of Hurricane Katrina

provided a stark contrast to the usual media coverage of social issues: "in the immediate aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, there was for a very short time a quality of vividness and clarity of focus in our

public discourse that reminded some Americans ? including some journalists

? that vividness and

clarity used to be more common in the way we talk with one another about the problems and the choices that we face. But then, like a passing summer storm, the moment faded" (Gore 2007, 2).

3. Scholars have long debated the question of what exactly constitutes the middle class, whether middle class is defined in relative or absolute terms, in sociological or economic terms, whether

surveys in which respondents self-identify class are accurate reflections of the true class structure (cf. Zweig 2000, Ch. 1; Pressman 2007, 182-183; Weller 2006). We also believe that the objection to

defining the middle class in clear terms is a reflection of the reluctance on the part of many conservative scholars to discuss the existence of income inequality. We note that, with the latest

Survey of Consumer Finances, conservatives are no longer arguing that there has been no worsening of wealth distribution. As Bartels notes:

The past thirty years have seen a substantial increase in economic inequality in the United States. The exact magnitude and timing of this increase depend on exactly how one defines economic inequality, but a variety of plausible measures suggest that the income gap between rich and poor has widened considerably. For example, the Gini coefficient for the distribution of individual earnings of full-time workers increased by almost 25 percent (from .326 to .406) between 1970 and 2000, while the income share of the richest five percent of U.S. households increased by more than one-third (from 15.8 percent to 21.5 percent) between 1980 and 2000. (Bartels 2004, 1)

4. This information is based on a search of the ProQuest newspaper index of six major newspapers (New York Times, Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, the Chicago Tribune, and the Los Angeles Times) on key words: inequality and income or wealth. See Table 1.

Table 1. Number of Articles by Mainstream Newspaper Outlets on the Subjects of Income and Wealth Inequality

Newspaper Number of Articles Number of articles

_1/1/1997 to 1/1/2002 1/1/2002-6/8/2007 New York

Times_31_68_ Washington Post_15_44_ Wall Street

Journal_3_9_ USA

Today_5_2_ Chicago Tribune_6_10_ Los Angeles Times_24_24

Total_84_157_ Total (excluding LA

Times)_60_133_



148 Dell P. Champlin and Janet T. Knoedler

5. The series, titled "Class Matters," ran in the New York Times in May and early June 2005, and was later published in a book of the same title (Correspondents of the New York Times 2005). This series is important, because the New York Times, as the leading national newspaper, "sets the agenda for what network television and other national newspapers will report on for that day and the next" (Fogarty 2005, 155).

6. The May 13, 2005 article by Wessel in the Wall Street Journal even uses the market forces of

globalization and technological change to argue against activist policy to reverse the trends, noting that government policy to address the decline in the minimum wage or to address the health care

crisis, would, according to some politicians, "do unacceptably large damage to economic growth." 7. The master narrative is a term adapted by Eric Alterman from Joan Didion's Political Fictions to

describe how a "consensus narrative" is developed and then used by reporters for the major media outlets to frame all future discussions. The "master narrative" is "comprised of numerous

'understandings, tacit agreements, large and small, to overlook the observable in explaining a

dramatic story line"' (Didion 2001, 37, quoted in Alterman 2003, 151). In her own book, Didion

goes on to explain that this narrative is "designed ... to maintain the illusion of consensus by obscuring rather than addressing actual issues" (41).

8. To quote Alterman on this point, "the single-minded focus on wealth creation' crowded out concerns for virtually everything that might be perceived to interfere with it, such as workers' pay, environmental destruction, equity issues, and as investors found to their deep chagrin, honest

accounting" (Alterman 2003, 123). 9. We note here that Brian Fogarty's analysis of economic content in the New York Times between 1980

and 1996 found that the media emphasized negative economic news, specifically, increases in the

unemployment rate. However, his study focused on standard macroeconomic indicators such as

unemployment, inflation, and a composite of economic growth indicators (Fogarty 2005, 155-157). As Wallace Peterson has argued, simply looking at the standard macroeconomic indicators fails to

plumb the depth of the crisis affecting the U.S. middle class (Peterson 1994). 10. See also Grobe 2004, 11. We note in passing that the inaccessibility of most professional economics

literature for the general public undoubtedly exacerbates this trend. 11. Michael Gerson and David Frum, two former speechwriters for George W. Bush, have been

especially noteworthy for their flourishing rhetoric. 12. It has been suggested that the inaccurate coverage of economic news, especially news about such

long-term and complex subjects as the fortunes of the American middle class, is due to the

complexity of language and technique used by neoclassical economists in their academic research on

such subjects. David Hamermesh recently instructed academic economists to speak to the media "in a language that their high-school graduate nephew of above-average intelligence can

understand" (Hamermesh 2004, 373). Of course, there is danger in over-simplifying economic

explanations: Hamermesh goes on to cite a "very senior economics professor (who) was noted for

talking to any media outlet about anything .... (and for giving) a very simplistic supply-demand

analysis of any issue" (Hamermesh 2004, 374). In addition, Michael Weinstein, a member of the

New York Times editorial board in the early 1990s, observed that those who have become engaged in public discussions of economic issues often do so for financial remuneration rather than to serve

the public need for economic literacy, and thus the journalist's task of "finding a disinterested

scholar willing and able to take a wide-angled ? even irrelevant ? view becomes

Herculean" (Weinstein 1992, 76). 13. Yarrow argues that prior to World War II, most financial reporting was confined to narrow

reporting on prominent business leaders and individual businesses. After the war, newspapers and

financial magazines such as Fortune, Forbes, and Business Week began to take a broader perspective on

the economy. Newspapers and general interest magazines such as Life, Time, and Newsweek also

began to cover the national economy for the general audience. Until the late 1960s, however, the

"big story" was American economic growth and prosperity of the middle classes. At the height of the

Cold War, the relentless message of good economic news took on explicitly political overtones

(Yarrow 2006, 59). Yarrow also notes that a key part of the message was that everyone shared in this

prosperity. The only "class" in America was the middle class, as workers or the working class were

redefined as consumers (68-69). This view is echoed by Michael Zweig who notes that a twice-daily show was produced by the United Autoworkers in the 1950s that provided news to workers on their




union, the auto industry, and the "larger economy . . . from the point of view of working people" (Zweig 2000, 137). However, this program was not carried by U.S. radio stations, even then, and had to be broadcast out of Canada. The United Autoworkers ceased production of this

program in the 1960s.

14. We note two additional factors that may indicate other problems with the news media. Readership of newspapers has declined dramatically over the past four decades, falling to 54% in 2005 from a

high of 81% in the mid-1960s (Cornog 2005, 43), roughly the period of economic decline and

growing inequality for the middle class. Newspapers have tried to halt this trend by offering more

celebrity news and devoting more pages to entertainment topics. This same period has seen a

decline in viewership for the three nightly newscasts for the three major networks of 44% since 1980. Evan Cornog notes that these declines are worrisome, in particular the decline in newspaper

reading, "given the close correlation between newspaper reading and active citizenship" (Cornog 2005, 44).

15. This argument has been made by the former chairman of the Federal Communications Commission. See Powell quoted in Champlin and Knoedler 2002. See also Klineberg 2007; Hamilton 2004, 4, 107 ff.

16. As one example, the Columbia Journalism Review reports that 22 percent of total cable news airtime was devoted to the Anna Nicole Smith story from the time of her death to the funeral, and 32

percent of Fox News Channel's airtime. During the same time, eleven percent of cable airtime was

devoted to the presidential election that was still eighteen months away. See Anonymous, "Hard Numbers" Columbia Journalism Review 46, 1 (2007): 15.

17. In a similar vein, Michael Parenti has written that the job of the press is ". . . not to produce an alert, critical and informed citizenry but the kind of people who will accept an opinion universe dominated by corporate and governmental elites, almost all of whom share the same ideological perspective about political and economic reality" (Parenti 1993, 8).

18. For example, the middle class has been split into "Middle America," a cultural rather than an economic label, and "working families," an economic term that is used by Lou Dobbs and others to fuel the cultural wars.

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