Why did American press coverage of the US economy just go into overdrive?
Ari MelberThis is just a quick blog post to flag an important media trend: the American press is finally covering the economy again.
While the recession and unemployment are some of the most significant problems facing the public, the press does not actually prioritize economic coverage very often, outside of crisis events or the economy as politics. But both those dynamics—the threat of real crisis and the intensity of political squabbles over the (typically standard) increase in the debt ceiling—have now put the economy back on top of the press agenda.
“Not only has the economy become a much bigger story, it is a bigger story no matter where one looks,” notes a new report from Pew. “The topic was the No. 1 subject in all five media sectors studied,” the report stressed, referring to blanket coverage across print, online, network TV, cable and radio.
The economy was far and away the big story last week, accounting 37 percent of the “newshole.” That’s more than triple the coverage of the next biggest item, the NewsCorp hacking scandal.
Over the past month, in fact, economic coverage has jumped from just one out ten stories to over one out of three:
Political scientists talk about the “agenda-setting function” of press coverage in politics, where almost anything that the press chooses to cover will seem more important, as an issue, to media consumers. But here, the GOP converted a routine housekeeping measure into default brinksmanship, and it looks like the media is affirming that agenda.
Pew estimates that about 85 percent of this economic coverage is about the debt battle—not the unemployment and recession that form the real threat to most Americans concerned about the economy.
Ari MelberTwitterAri Melber is The Nation's Net movement correspondent, covering politics, law, public policy and new media, and a regular contributor to the magazine's blog. He received a Bachelor of Arts in Political Science from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor and a J.D. from Cornell Law School, where he was an editor of the Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy. Contact Ari: on Facebook, on Twitter, and at amelber@hotmail.com. Melber is also an attorney, a columnist for Politico and a contributing editor at techPresident, a nonpartisan website covering technology’s impact on democracy. During the 2008 general election, he traveled with the Obama Campaign on special assignment for The Washington Independent. He previously served as a Legislative Aide in the US Senate and as a national staff member of the 2004 John Kerry Presidential Campaign. As a commentator on public affairs, Melber frequently speaks on national television and radio, including including appearances on NBC, CNBC, CNN, CNN Headline News, C-SPAN, MSNBC, Bloomberg News, FOX News, and NPR, on programs such as “The Today Show,” “American Morning,” “Washington Journal,” “Power Lunch,” "The Last Word with Lawrence O'Donnell," "The Joy Behar Show," “The Dylan Ratigan Show,” and “The Daily Rundown,” among others. Melber has also been a featured speaker at Harvard, Oxford, Yale, Columbia, NYU, The Center for American Progress and many other institutions. He has contributed chapters or essays to the books “America Now,” (St. Martins, 2009), “At Issue: Affirmative Action,” (Cengage, 2009), and “MoveOn’s 50 Ways to Love Your Country,” (Inner Ocean Publishing, 2004). His reporting has been cited by a wide range of news organizations, academic journals and nonfiction books, including the The Washington Post, The New York Times, ABC News, NBC News, CNN, FOX News, National Review Online, The New England Journal of Medicine and Boston University Law Review. He is a member of the American Constitution Society, he serves on the advisory board of the Roosevelt Institute and lives in Manhattan.