Corporate Interests: How the News Media Portray the Economy

Abstract

This study examines contradictory claims about the news media's coverage of the economy.After discussing various sociological perspectives on news media, I compare the objective performance of California's economy, as measured by statistical indicators, to accounts of the economy found in the state's largest newspaper-the Los Angeles Times.The data reveal that, despite growth patterns that overwhelmingly favored economic elites, the negative news about the economy disproportionately depicted events and problems affecting corporations and investors instead of the general workforce.When the Times did discuss problems affecting workers, the articles were relatively short, most often placed in the back sections of the newspaper, and rarely discussed policy alternatives to the status quo.Moreover, unlike the viewpoints of business leaders and government officials, the viewpoints of workers or their spokespersons were rarely used as sources of information.These findings provide qualified support for existing scholarship purporting that the news media, when reporting on the economy, privilege the interests of corporations and investors over the interests of the general workforce.The news media's coverage of the economy, along with its attendant political consequences, has been the subject of considerable debate within the social science literature.Although most social scientists and media critics believe that the news media suffer from various shortcomings (see review article by Gamson et al. 1992), and that these shortcomings affect the content of the news, the social science literature contains significant disagreements over basic questions about how the news media generally depict the economy.For example, some scholars contend that members of the news media hold overly antagonistic views about the corporate community, and that these attitudes, along with a general desire to help "liberal" political causes, manifest as a disproportionate number of negative articles about the economy.Most scholars, however, disagree with this argument.Pointing to structural links to the capitalist economy, strong social ties to the federal government and the corporate community, and a reliance on "official sources" for much of the information that eventually becomes news, other scholars contend that the news media typically focus on the common economic interests and concerns of the country's economic elite.Furthermore, these scholars hold that the news media, by covering the economy in this manner, constrain public discourse on important economic policy issues, keeping it within a range of ideas supportive of the existing socioeconomic order.Using a content analysis of California's largest newspaper, the Los Angeles Times , this study empirically analyzes these contradictory claims.During the late 1990s, the patterns of growth in California's economy exacerbated preexisting levels of inequality in the state.While corporations

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