Stock market coverage shows upper-class bias

Sean McElwee writes for Talking Points Memo that an upper-class bias exists in how the media cover the stock market.

McElwee writes, “One psychological bias humans suffer from is the ‘availability heuristic’ — a tendency to generalize based on our immediate surroundings. It crops up in numerous ways: If you live in New York City, you might overestimate how many people commute by public transportation, since 40 percent of public transportation commuters in the whole country live in NYC. These biases certainly afflict newsrooms, which are whiter and more male than the general population and come from wealthier backgrounds. Most live in cities and live flight- and Uber-filled lives that simply don’t comport with the lives of average Americans.

“In other words, the media coverage has a distinctly upper-class bias. Case in point: the financial news of the last couple of days. Yesterday, when the Dow Jones dropped dramatically, news organizations were quick to report on the development. Twitter was ablaze with analysis and a new hashtag ‘Black Monday’ was born (earning over 100,000 tweets when this article was written).

“Yet fewer than half of Americans own stocks, and the top 10 percent richest Americans owned nearly 90 percent of all stocks, bonds, trusts and business equity in 2013 (see chart). Investment asset ownership is also divided across race lines, making up 17 percent of assets among non-Hispanic white households, but only 3.4 percent for black households and 2.5 percent for Hispanic households. For most Americans, the fact that wages for all but the richest 5 percent have fallen over the past seven years is a far more important story.”

Read more here.