The business media undercovers the working class, according to research from the Economic Hardship Reporting Project.
Columbia University professor Elena Krumova spoke with Columbia Journalism Review about the results. Here is an excerpt:
What stood out to me from your study is that a majority of the mentions of the “working class” after 2015—70 to 80 percent for regional papers, and about 60 percent for the Times—were pegged to politics or election coverage topics. Did this, for you, suggest that the papers in the study largely saw the working class as a category to be wheeled out before an election, but forgotten in between?
Yes, it means that “working class” as a category has become something to talk about, to discuss, in a political context, not in any kind of other context. Specifically, how they vote. Or it could be in terms of who is campaigning where. It could be in terms of election results. It could be in terms of the background of politicians who talk about their origins. But “working class” has become a signifier for an ill-defined, even mythical category.
What do you think we lose when the working class are primarily viewed through this prism of horse-race politics in media coverage?
What is lost is attention to real, important issues affecting people on the ground, especially locally. When there is union organizing and strikes happening on the ground, for instance, and there are no reporters following it closely, the coverage that does emerge can feel surprising or out of context. And a Reuters Institute study found that, between 2015 and 2024, people without a college education are disengaging from reading the news at a higher rate than those with a college education.
