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NY Times, WaPo Giving Scant Attention to Economic Inequality, Study Shows
But Coverage Will Increase if Trump Enacts More Tax Cuts that Favor the Wealthy

803 Words
By David Demers

Wealth gaps are increasing rapidly in the United States, but the two most powerful and respected print news media organizations are giving very little attention to the social problem.
This is the key finding from a content analysis I conducted of news stories in the archives of the Washington Post and New York Times over the last 25 years.
For more than four decades, gaps in wealth and income between the wealthiest 10 percent of taxpayers and the poorest 50 percent have been skyrocketing. In 1981, the wealth gap was about $900,000; today, it’s $3.6 million (inflation-adjusted, see Figure 1). The wealthiest 10th percentile posses two-thirds of the nation’s assets (average wealth of $3,568,063 per taxpayer), while the bottom 50th percentile only has 2.5 percent (average wealth of $13,374).
Despite increasing wealth gaps, news stories about “economic inequality” have declined 65 percent in the last three years (see Figure 2). In 2024 (through December 6), the Post and Times together published 102 stories compared to 293 stories in 2021.
Coverage of economic inequality in the news has waxed and waned over the last 25 years.
In 2000, the Post and Times published a combined total of only 26 stories or commentaries on economic inequality (see Figure 2). The annual number of stories published remained relatively low until 2012, when coverage quintupled to 132.
Coverage shot up even more from 2013 to 2017, when President Barack Obama made economic inequality a central part of his second-term policy agenda. He pushed for legislative changes that would reduce wealth and income gaps, but Republicans refused to cooperate. Wealth and income gaps have been scientifically linked to increased mortality, poverty and crime rates, destruction of the environment, differential access to culture, radical right politics, and declines in democratic processes.
During Obama’s second term, the Post published twice as many articles about economic inequality as the Times. The cause of this discrepancy is not entirely clear and may simply stem from differences in editorial judgment. In 2021, the Post published a three-part in-depth series on wealth and income gaps.
Coverage of inequality at the Post dropped substantially during Obama’s last year in office. But it shot up at both newspapers after Donald Trump’s 2017 tax cut bill was introduced and enacted. That bill allocated most of the tax cuts to the wealthy, and the focus of news coverage now had turned to how the cuts were exacerbating inequality.
After Joe Biden was elected in 2020, coverage of inequality dropped off again, even though wealth gaps continue to grow and Biden promised he would raise taxes on the wealthy (he never did). Figure 3 shows the relationship between the growing wealth of the top 10th percentile and news stories about economic inequality. (The raw data for each of these variables were standardized — converted into Z-scores — for comparison purposes.)
In general, the results show that coverage of economic inequality increases as the top 10 percent become more wealthy, but coverage dropped considerably after 2020, when stories about COVID and inflation dominated the news.
Figure 3 also shows that the gap between increasing wealth and news coverage of inequality is greater now than at any time in history, about two standard deviations (95%) apart .
This gap illustrates that news does not necessarily reflect an objective reality with respect to social problems. More often than not, the news reflects the concerns and interests of powerful elites, who are perceived to be more legitimate sources of news than the working class and organizations with little power. In fact, the news is a crude reflection of the power structure in a society. When powerful elites identify something as a social problem, news coverage typically increases. When elites ignore an issue, coverage drops or never emerges.
As a rule, Republican and conservative elites are far less likely than Democratic and liberal elites to talk about economic inequality, because the former tend to frame inequality as an individual problem, not a structural one stemming from policy decisions (e.g., tax cuts, anti-tax inheritance laws) and from the economies of scale and increased investment options associated with large amounts of capital (it’s easier to make money when one has money).
However, these findings strongly suggest that coverage of economic inequality likely will increase if Trump 2.0 enacts additional tax cuts that favor the wealthy. Democrats and other pro-equality elites will argue these cuts are proof that Trump doesn’t really care about the interests of his working-class base. Of course, conflict makes news, and the news media will be there to cover the controversy.

Methodology

An online search of the archives of the Washington Post and New York Times on December 6 produced 2,418 and 1,784 stories, respectively, that mention “economic inequality” from 2000 to 2024. Additional qualitative research was conducted to analyze the spikes and declines in the coverage.