Presidential Leadership, the News Media, and Income Inequality

Abstract

Most research on media in the post-broadcast age of politics focuses on how media affect the public, not on the interinstitutional relationships between the presidency and news media. This study tackles this important topic by studying news coverage of and presidential attention to the issue of income inequality. We use web scraping and text analysis software to build a dataset of weekly news coverage from 1999 through 2013, across traditional and nontraditional media, including newspapers, broadcast and cable television transcripts, and online news websites. The data show that presidential attention to income inequality influences the income inequality news agenda across all sources except network television and affects the tone of newspaper coverage. Presidential influence of tone is especially pronounced on income inequality issues that have an international focus. The implications of this paper are significant not only for understanding how media and the presidency interact in the post-broadcast age but also for the prospects for federal policies that may combat income inequality.

Social media influencers: A route to brand engagement for their followers

“…As is common in studies employing ATA, a scraping tool was used to collect our data (cf. Chun, 2019 andEshbaugh-Soha &McGauvran, 2018). A word processing program was used which downloaded the comments from each video into a unique spreadsheet file.…”

The tone of the president's immigration rhetoric

“…Burden and Sandberg (2003) demonstrate that tone in presidential campaign rhetoric is partially a function of partisanship, with Democrats more likely to use positive tone when speaking about budgets. Still, others study how positive rhetoric motivates bureaucrats, increases worker morale, and reduces quit rates in some federal agencies (Eshbaugh‐Soha, 2006, 2017), yet the president's tone has a limited impact on news coverage of income inequality (Eshbaugh‐Soha & McGauvran, 2018).…”

Entertaining Beliefs in Economic Mobility

“…The news media have devoted considerable attention to rising income inequality, with a consistent focus on highlighting the diminishing prospects of upward mobility for the American working and middle classes (Diermeier et al. 2017; Eshbaugh‐Soha and McGauvran 2018; McCall 2013). Indeed, as seen in Figure 1, sentiments in news coverage about economic mobility in America have been predominantly negative over the last two decades.…”

“…In sync with the news media's well-known tendency to overreport negative economic information (Soroka 2006) and the worsening economic realities of the new Gilded Age, it is no surprise that the news media typically offer information about downward economic mobility. The news media have devoted considerable attention to rising income inequality, with a consistent focus on highlighting the diminishing prospects of upward mobility for the American working and middle classes (Diermeier et al 2017;Eshbaugh-Soha and McGauvran 2018;Mc-Call 2013). Indeed, as seen in Figure 1, sentiments in news coverage about economic mobility in America have been predominantly negative over the last two decades.…”