History of coverage
Coverage of the middle class fits into pretty clear categories over the years.
The overarching theme dominating the coverage is backed by a concern for the middle class based on a romanticization of the lifestyle associated with being in the middle. Most Americans want to identify as middle class, according to a 2012 Gallup poll. As income inequality has grown since the late 1960s, the concern for the class almost synonymous with America has evolved.
In analyzing New York Times articles from the late 1960s to the mid 2000s, we found several themes that grew out of this concern for the American institution that is the middle class. As the income gap grew over time, the way that concern was addressed in the media also evolved. More early articles focused on changes to the racial makeup of the middle class, as minorities became more upwardly mobile. Also, gender was brought up on a few occasions as more women entered the workforce because families became aware they needed two incomes to sustain their lifestyle. As the decades changed, concerns about middle-class life changed, too. Middle-class prosperity began to be discussed in terms of higher education attainment and access to financial aid, government (as politicians worked to appeal to middle-class voters more than ever), and the overall quality of life middle class people experienced.
We started in 1967, about the time when the income gap began widening between the nation’s richest people and the middle and lower classes. From then until 2004 we read three articles a year with the keywords “middle class” in them. We used ProQuest Newsstand: New York Times to find these articles. We took notes about the language used and summarized the major themes of the article to identify trends. We sorted the articles into six categories -- crime, gender, education, race, politics/government and quality of life. We identified some common narratives about the middle class that reappear often throughout the years and decades.
The overarching theme dominating the coverage is backed by a concern for the middle class based on a romanticization of the lifestyle associated with being in the middle. Most Americans want to identify as middle class, according to a 2012 Gallup poll. As income inequality has grown since the late 1960s, the concern for the class almost synonymous with America has evolved.
In analyzing New York Times articles from the late 1960s to the mid 2000s, we found several themes that grew out of this concern for the American institution that is the middle class. As the income gap grew over time, the way that concern was addressed in the media also evolved. More early articles focused on changes to the racial makeup of the middle class, as minorities became more upwardly mobile. Also, gender was brought up on a few occasions as more women entered the workforce because families became aware they needed two incomes to sustain their lifestyle. As the decades changed, concerns about middle-class life changed, too. Middle-class prosperity began to be discussed in terms of higher education attainment and access to financial aid, government (as politicians worked to appeal to middle-class voters more than ever), and the overall quality of life middle class people experienced.
We started in 1967, about the time when the income gap began widening between the nation’s richest people and the middle and lower classes. From then until 2004 we read three articles a year with the keywords “middle class” in them. We used ProQuest Newsstand: New York Times to find these articles. We took notes about the language used and summarized the major themes of the article to identify trends. We sorted the articles into six categories -- crime, gender, education, race, politics/government and quality of life. We identified some common narratives about the middle class that reappear often throughout the years and decades.
Major narratives and themes:
As the income gap grows over time between the richest Americans and everyone else, more articles are written about quality of life and politics and government. This shows a growing concern for the standard of living of middle class Americans in the press, and it shows how politicians address that concern in their platforms and messages.
Crime
For more examples of content click here, to see full article, search headlines and dates in the New York Times archives.
- Articles and stories about drug use reflect a concern for the deterioration of the middle class. The press’ concern for the health and well-being of the middle class shows with the number of stories written about middle-class drug use. Several articles in each decade explain that this trend is on the rise, but rarely cite statistics to support those claims. Often the assertion is made that the middle class is able to hide its drug use because its people have high-paying jobs and health insurance. More than anything, the stories about middle class and addition show a concern about the middle class falling apart.
- More middle class families require two incomes for support. More women began to enter the workplace to help support their families as the spending power of the dollar decreased. Many stories about the middle class in the 70s on reference families with two working parents, some who are still just scraping by or making cuts to the recreational or food budgets as time goes on.
- Education is seen as increasingly important to maintaining middle-class status, but is becoming more difficult for the middle class to afford. Several articles pointed out the lack of financial aid available to middle-class students and policies proposed by politicians to try to change that. Also, Ivy League universities began to set the trend of offering more financial aid to middle-class students in the 1980s, after realizing the number of middle-class students enrolling was decreasing while upper and lower-income students were increasing.
- White and middle class are synonymous. Often when a person was described as “middle class,” their race was only noted if they were not white. A few articles detailed the trend of blacks and Hispanics increasingly moving out of cities to the suburbs and the reaction of predominantly white communities to this trend.
- Politicians desperately try to appeal to middle-class voters by making promises to them, then fail to uphold those promises. Often in election years, presidential candidates speak about making tax cuts for the middle class and stressing the importance of middle-class strength. They extol middle-class values as quintessential American values. Both Republicans and Democrats make efforts to sway middle-class voters to their side.
- The lower class is often portrayed as a drain on resources and tax dollars, which is implied as being detrimental to the middle class. The upper class is often portrayed as elitist and self-serving, constantly trying to lower their own taxes while forcing the middle and lower classes to pay higher proportions of income in taxes.
- Middle-class values are considered to be typical American values. A major theme is the desire to preserve an idealized way of life associated with the middle class. The image of the suburban home with one working parent and two children in a good school district is important and appears frequently in different forms. But this lifestyle is considered to be constantly threatened, and stories often reference families who cut back on a vacation or feel a pinch after a big grocery shopping trip.
For more examples of content click here, to see full article, search headlines and dates in the New York Times archives.