Dear Readers,
Welcome to our senior capstone project, which we hope will serve as a framework for guiding journalists’ coverage of economic inequality in the United States. Through interviews and research, we’ve compiled a guide to the history of inequality, a section of myths and misconceptions debunked by people who’ve covered it, useful data and ways to find community sources. The end result, we hope, is a website that will inform journalists about the multifaceted issue of economic inequality and provide them with a better idea of how to cover it in their respective communities.
During this process, we’ve learned many important things about the issue of economic inequality, and we believe those things should be passed on to anyone who would either learn from our work or continue it. First off, anyone covering the issue should understand that economic inequality is a much bigger issue than most people think. A few of us discovered that we held an underlying assumption that income inequality primarily had to do with poverty. As we delved further into the issue, we saw its impact on every socioeconomic class. It’s not just the impact of poverty – the poor are getting poorer, the middle class is shrinking, and the top bracket of wealth is getting smaller and more powerful but losing the consumer base that funds it.
At the conclusion of our research, we believe the way journalists report on this topic needs to change if communities are to be accurately represented in coverage the news media produces. Economic inequality is a behemoth and covering it well requires everyone within a newsroom to be on board, from the editor-in-chief to beat reporters. One way to improve coverage would be to use more comparisons to illustrate topics. Most audience members don’t understand what a Gini coefficient is, but they’ll understand what it means when you tell them that economic inequality is greater in today's America than it was in Apartheid South Africa. Taking stories out of a purely economic framework is an efficient and impactful way to cover issues relating to economic inequality.
One challenge we’ve discovered while reading commentary and gauging responses to other work on economic inequality was that the discussion oftentimes made people uncomfortable. To some, the discussion of inequality as a problem in need of fixing seemed like a challenge to the prevailing ethos of American society as a fair meritocracy. Others will acknowledge that the system’s setup disadvantages certain classes, but will be hesitant to endorse any changes because they may be “unfair” to those from whom the concentration of wealth would be spreading. While we didn’t directly encounter such pushback because we didn’t create actual news coverage, the strategy we would recommend to avoid it would be to present the issue not as a matter of the “haves” versus the “have-nots,” but as a system that is currently unsustainable, even for the people at the top, under its current setup. Moving forward, journalists needs to realize the American Dream may no longer be an accurate narrative through which to frame stories. Economic inequality has changed this country as we know it and that should be considered when reporters cover anything, from the local economy to sports.
Depending on the size of your news organization, you may not be able to dedicate an entire beat to covering economic inequality. If that is the case, you can train a writer or two on each beat to incorporate discussion of economic inequality into their articles, or to write feature pieces about an issue in their beat that has been affected by economic inequality. It's important for journalists to provide their audiences with a rudimentary enough understanding of our country’s economics so the audiences can see for themselves why economic inequality in its current form is troubling. It is not the journalists’ job to tell audiences what to think, rather, our hope for this guide is that it helps journalists enhance their coverage of a subject in order to get ahead of the issue with proactive – instead of reactive – journalism that gives audiences the necessary information to be aware of the potential pitfalls ahead if our system continues as it is.
Regardless of how you implement coverage of economic inequality into your newsroom, you should develop a clear plan of how to do so, and a goal for your coverage. It can add depth and complexity to a large amount of your stories, as it is an issue that touches on all of the fault lines of race, class, gender, generation and geography. Journalists covering economic inequality should also consider and try to include the perspective of each of the stakeholders. This will lead to more comprehensive and detailed coverage that is pertinent to their community. The most important advice we could give to a newsroom taking this complicated but crucial subject on would be to do what you can. You don't have to have tons of resources, time or people to include this issue in your coverage. Just be knowledgeable and creative. Even small coverage will go a long way and your community will appreciate it and benefit from it.
Along with learning how newsrooms can benefit from supplementing their coverage of economic inequality, we also learned some strategies we would recommend to anyone looking to continue our project of creating a guide for enhancing newsroom coverage of economic inequality. Our work from this semester hopefully established a framework for journalists to be able to decipher and present the basics of economic inequality. For the next step of continuing this guide, we would recommend focusing heavily on the cyclical nature of the economic forces functioning to reinforce inequality in this country. We’d also recommend more focus on the historical and sociological sides of what caused the issue and how it started. We’d also spend more time talking to citizens instead of journalists for a perspective on how well citizens are being served. We’d also focus on the way the topic of economic inequality weaves its way through the fabric of society through a myriad of topics such as education, labor unions, inheritances and much more. We’d also work more on increasing journalists’ financial literacy and establishing a blueprint for how they can present complicated issues in a manner that can be easily absorbed by the audience.
Regardless of how you plan on using our information, we have come to feel strongly that economic inequality is a serious issue worth analyzing and covering at any news organization. It is one of the defining crises facing our generation, and we hope you find the information on this website of great help in the complicated but rewarding challenge of covering economic inequality.
Sincerely,
Fall 2014 Journalism and Democracy capstone class
Missouri School of Journalism
During this process, we’ve learned many important things about the issue of economic inequality, and we believe those things should be passed on to anyone who would either learn from our work or continue it. First off, anyone covering the issue should understand that economic inequality is a much bigger issue than most people think. A few of us discovered that we held an underlying assumption that income inequality primarily had to do with poverty. As we delved further into the issue, we saw its impact on every socioeconomic class. It’s not just the impact of poverty – the poor are getting poorer, the middle class is shrinking, and the top bracket of wealth is getting smaller and more powerful but losing the consumer base that funds it.
At the conclusion of our research, we believe the way journalists report on this topic needs to change if communities are to be accurately represented in coverage the news media produces. Economic inequality is a behemoth and covering it well requires everyone within a newsroom to be on board, from the editor-in-chief to beat reporters. One way to improve coverage would be to use more comparisons to illustrate topics. Most audience members don’t understand what a Gini coefficient is, but they’ll understand what it means when you tell them that economic inequality is greater in today's America than it was in Apartheid South Africa. Taking stories out of a purely economic framework is an efficient and impactful way to cover issues relating to economic inequality.
One challenge we’ve discovered while reading commentary and gauging responses to other work on economic inequality was that the discussion oftentimes made people uncomfortable. To some, the discussion of inequality as a problem in need of fixing seemed like a challenge to the prevailing ethos of American society as a fair meritocracy. Others will acknowledge that the system’s setup disadvantages certain classes, but will be hesitant to endorse any changes because they may be “unfair” to those from whom the concentration of wealth would be spreading. While we didn’t directly encounter such pushback because we didn’t create actual news coverage, the strategy we would recommend to avoid it would be to present the issue not as a matter of the “haves” versus the “have-nots,” but as a system that is currently unsustainable, even for the people at the top, under its current setup. Moving forward, journalists needs to realize the American Dream may no longer be an accurate narrative through which to frame stories. Economic inequality has changed this country as we know it and that should be considered when reporters cover anything, from the local economy to sports.
Depending on the size of your news organization, you may not be able to dedicate an entire beat to covering economic inequality. If that is the case, you can train a writer or two on each beat to incorporate discussion of economic inequality into their articles, or to write feature pieces about an issue in their beat that has been affected by economic inequality. It's important for journalists to provide their audiences with a rudimentary enough understanding of our country’s economics so the audiences can see for themselves why economic inequality in its current form is troubling. It is not the journalists’ job to tell audiences what to think, rather, our hope for this guide is that it helps journalists enhance their coverage of a subject in order to get ahead of the issue with proactive – instead of reactive – journalism that gives audiences the necessary information to be aware of the potential pitfalls ahead if our system continues as it is.
Regardless of how you implement coverage of economic inequality into your newsroom, you should develop a clear plan of how to do so, and a goal for your coverage. It can add depth and complexity to a large amount of your stories, as it is an issue that touches on all of the fault lines of race, class, gender, generation and geography. Journalists covering economic inequality should also consider and try to include the perspective of each of the stakeholders. This will lead to more comprehensive and detailed coverage that is pertinent to their community. The most important advice we could give to a newsroom taking this complicated but crucial subject on would be to do what you can. You don't have to have tons of resources, time or people to include this issue in your coverage. Just be knowledgeable and creative. Even small coverage will go a long way and your community will appreciate it and benefit from it.
Along with learning how newsrooms can benefit from supplementing their coverage of economic inequality, we also learned some strategies we would recommend to anyone looking to continue our project of creating a guide for enhancing newsroom coverage of economic inequality. Our work from this semester hopefully established a framework for journalists to be able to decipher and present the basics of economic inequality. For the next step of continuing this guide, we would recommend focusing heavily on the cyclical nature of the economic forces functioning to reinforce inequality in this country. We’d also recommend more focus on the historical and sociological sides of what caused the issue and how it started. We’d also spend more time talking to citizens instead of journalists for a perspective on how well citizens are being served. We’d also focus on the way the topic of economic inequality weaves its way through the fabric of society through a myriad of topics such as education, labor unions, inheritances and much more. We’d also work more on increasing journalists’ financial literacy and establishing a blueprint for how they can present complicated issues in a manner that can be easily absorbed by the audience.
Regardless of how you plan on using our information, we have come to feel strongly that economic inequality is a serious issue worth analyzing and covering at any news organization. It is one of the defining crises facing our generation, and we hope you find the information on this website of great help in the complicated but rewarding challenge of covering economic inequality.
Sincerely,
Fall 2014 Journalism and Democracy capstone class
Missouri School of Journalism