Where Is the Tipping Point for Wealth Gaps?
1,042 Words
David Demers
I was a visiting professor in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Minnesota when New York Times newspaper reporter William Glaberson called me in February 1996. [1]
“Dr. Demers, I am working on a story about the loss of family-owned newspapers, and I see you have just published a book about corporate newspaper ownership. May I ask you some questions?”
“Hell yeah!” I wanted to shout but instead responded, “I’d be delighted to help you, Mr. Glaberson.”
It was, to me, one of those tipping-point moments that Malcolm Gladwell talked about a decade later in his popular book. Most scholars, including those who develop good theories that could help make the world a better place, live their lives in relative obscurity. They publish in journals that are read by a small number of scholars in their fields, but they have little-to-no impact on public policymaking, partly because news media don’t spend a lot of time covering social scientific research. [2]
Glaberson said he had not read my book but had ordered a copy.
In The Menace of the Corporate Newspaper: Fact or Fiction? [3], I argued that large newspapers and chain or corporate news organizations generally produce a higher quality product and a greater diversity of voices than smaller, independently-owned newspapers, because corporate organizations have more human and monetary resources. The Times is a good example.
I spent the next hour or so answering Glaberson’s questions and explaining my theory and research. Not surprisingly, he was a critic of corporate ownership, as most journalists and scholars were at that time. They defined diversity in the marketplace more in terms of ownership than increasing professionalism — a characteristic of structurally complex organizations.
By the end of our conversation, I could tell I had not persuaded him as to the value of my theory and research. But he said he would withhold judgment until he read my book.
A week passed and we chatted again.
“I don’t know if I can buy into your theory,” he said.
“You don’t have to,” I said. “As a journalist, your role is report all sides of the story.”
But his story, which was published February 19, 1996, on page one of the business section, ignored my research. Most of his sources were critics of chain and corporate newspaper ownership.
Some might argue that Glaberson refused to publish my point of view because he was biased.
But I believe I was simply a victim of failed credibility.
When activists, scholars or citizens have a point of view that contradicts well-established mainstream beliefs or dominant values, whether right or wrong, it’s extremely difficult for their voices to be heard. Knowledge is not self-evident. It also involves discourse about the credibility of sources and information.
This also happens to be a big problem facing scholars and activists who push for reducing income and wealth gaps in America and seek national news coverage.
Mainstream journalists identify more with the power structure than with those trying to change it. [4] The vast majority of sources cited in the news media are political and economic elites, especially the wealthy (the top 10%) and their politicians. This dependence on the powerful stems in part from the structural linkages that economics and journalism have to the broader system. News beats are anchored in institutions of power and economists work for organizations that are linked to private foundations and government agencies that promote neo-libertarian economic policies.
So, when those elites don’t want to talk about a topic, it doesn’t get covered.
And without coverage, it can’t reach a tipping point.
That was particularly the case in 2024.
Proquest archives show that only 11 newspapers published stories or commentaries that included headlines with the terms “economic inequality,” “wealth gaps,” or “income inequality.” Correcting economic inequality would hurt elites’ pocketbooks, which are rapidly expanding at a an average inflation-adjusted annualized rate of 6 percent. This is six times higher than the rate of growth for the middle class (1.3%) and fifteen times higher than the rate for the working class (0.4%). [5]
I wish there was an easy way to convince the wealthy that sharing the wealth is in their best interest. But Stanford University history professor Walter Scheidel’s 2017 book The Great Leveler suggests that will never happen. [6] He scoured world history searching for evidence that economic inequality can be reduced substantially through benign political change. He considered land reform, debt relief, economic depressions, democracy, economic development, and education.
But only catastrophic events — like major wars (e.g., WWI, WWII), “transformative revolution” (communism, French revolution), state failure (Roman Empire, Somalia), and pandemics (bubonic plague, Justinianic plague) — significantly leveled wealth and income gaps. World War II, for example, wiped out wealth and wealth gaps across many countries and forced others, like the United States, to increase taxes substantially on the wealthy to pay war debts.
But since then, taxes on the wealthiest 10 percent have been cut by nearly 70 percent. Now they own two-thirds of the wealth in America. In 10 years, according to my estimates, they will own three-fourths. And if President Donald Trump makes good on his promises to cut taxes for the wealthy even more, we’ll get there sooner.
See you at the revolution.
ENDNOTES
1. This introductory story is adapted from David Demers, Adventures of Quixotic Professor: How One Man’s Lifelong Passion for Social Justice Bristles Bureaucracies and Sparks a Landmark Free Speech Ruling (Phoenix: Marquette Books, 2021), pp. 161-162.
2. Policymakers also routinely ignore social scientific research when it doesn’t reinforce their political biases. See David Demers, The Ivory Tower of Babel: Why the Social Sciences Are Failing to Live Up to Their Promises (New York: Algora Publishing, 2011).
3. David Pearce Demers, The Menace of the Corporate Newspaper: Fact or Fiction? (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1996).
4. David Demers, History and Future of Mass Media: An Integrated Perspective (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2007), see Chapter 16.
5. David Demers, “Are You Mad about Rapidly Expanding Wealth Gaps? Here’s Another Social Institution You Can Blame,” DavidDemers.com (January 17, 2025), retrieved 2/12/25 from <https://www.drdaviddemers.com/blame.html>.
6. Walter Scheidel, The Great Leveler: Violence an the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century (Princeton University Press, 2017).