The Media and Inequality

Steve Schifferes is currently Honorary Research Fellow at City University London’s Political Economy Research Centre (CityPERC) in the UK, where he was the Marjorie Deane Professor of Financial Journalism from 2009 to 2017. He has lectured widely on the global financial crisis and is the co-editor of two volumes, The Media and Financial Crises (2015), and The Media and Austerity (Routledge, 2018). He reported on economics and business for BBC News from 1989 to 2009. Sophie Knowles is Senior Lecturer in Journalism at Middlesex University, UK. She has written widely on the media’s role in the global financial crisis. She co-edited The Media and Austerity: Comparative Perspectives (Routledge, 2018). Her new book, The Mediation of Financial Crises: Watchdogs, Lapdogs or Canaries in the Coal Mine, was published in 2020.

List of Figures and Tables; Notes on Contributors; Acknowledgements; Remembering John Hills by Howard Glennerster; Introduction: The Media and Inequality; Part I: Understanding Inequality; 1. Flat-lining or Seething Beneath the Surface? Two Decades of Changing Economic Inequality in the UK; 2. Wealth Inequality in the UK; 3. The Decline of Social Mobility; 4. Racial Economic Inequality: The Visible Tip of an Inequality Iceberg?; 5. Home Ownership: The Key to Inequality?; Part II: Framing Poverty and Inequality; 6. Poverty and the Media: Poverty Myths and Exclusion in the Information Society; 7. The Rhetoric of Recession: How British Newspapers Talk About the Poor When Unemployment Rises; 8. Factual Television in the UK: The Rich, the Poor and Inequality; 9. Issue Attention to Income Inequality in the UK and US Print Media; 10. Comparative Trends in the Portrayal of Poverty and Inequality; Part III: Public Opinion, Inequality, and the Media; 11. Public Attitudes to Poverty and Inequality; 12. Debating Inequality: The Case of Piketty’s Capital in the 21st Century; 13. The Media and Austerity; 14. Covid, Inequality and the Media; 15. Stuck in a Feedback Loop: Why More Inequality Leads to Lower Levels of Concern