The media and inequality

This book brings together a vast range of pre-eminent experts, academics, and practitioners to interrogate the role of media in representing economic inequality. It explores and deconstructs the concept of economic inequality by examining the different dimensions of inequality and how it has evolved historically; how it has been represented and portrayed in the media; and how, in turn, those representations have informed the public’s knowledge of and attitudes towards poverty, class and welfare, and political discourse.

Taking a multi-disciplinary, comparative, and historical approach, and using a variety of new and original data sets to inform the research, studies herein examine the relationship between media and inequality in UK, Western Europe, and USA. In addition to generating new knowledge and research agendas, the book generates suggestions of ways to improve news coverage on this topic and raise the level of the debate, and will improve understanding about economic inequality, as it has evolved, and as it continues to develop in academic, political and media discourses.

This book will be of interest to academics and practitioners alike in the areas of journalism, media studies, economics, and the social sciences, as well as political commentators and those interested more broadly in social policy.

Steve Schifferes is currently Honorary Research Fellow at City University London’s Political Economy Research Centre (CityPERC) in the UK, where he was the Marjorie Deane Professor of Financial Journalism from 2009 to 2017. He has lectured widely on the global financial crisis and is the co-editor of two volumes, The Media and Financial Crises (2015), and The Media and Austerity (Routledge, 2018). He reported on economics and business for BBC News from 1989 to 2009.

Sophie Knowles is Senior Lecturer in Journalism at Middlesex University, UK. She has written widely on the media’s role in the global financial crisis. She co-edited The Media and Austerity: Comparative Perspectives (Routledge, 2018). Her new book, The Mediation of Financial Crises: Watchdogs, Lapdogs or Canaries in the Coal Mine, was published in 2020.