New at @apsrjournal now, research shows when media reports on the economy, the tone is most responsive to fortunes of the top 1%. In fact, conditional on income growth for that group, tone of economic news isn't correlated with bottom 99 incomes at all! cambridge.org/core/journals/… It's not malicious or clueless on the part of reporters. Rather, they report on the measures that we have been socialized to think are important and that the federal government centers, like GDP growth. The result is news that is class-biased towards the rich.

Important new working paper at @equitablegrowth. It finds that when newspapers cover the economy, coverage follows the fortunes of the rich: rising incomes for the rich = positive news and vice versa THREAD equitablegrowth.org/working-papers… ...but it's only true for the richest 10%! Incomes of *everyone else in the economy* do not influence the tone of economic news. More precisely, tone is correlated with lower- and middle-class income change, but only because they are sometimes correlated with high-income change