Looking Backward, Looking Forward

This chapter summarizes the book’s conclusions and suggests directions for future research. It also explores the book’s broader implications for democracy and the dynamics of political-economic power. The chapter stresses the need for interdisciplinary analyses that employ multiple methods and sources of evidence to better understand the role of media and public opinion in American political development. It also discusses how news coverage may contribute to the durability of key aspects of the broader neoliberal policy regime. It ends by situating the book’s analyses within scholarship on inequalities in political and economic power, arguing that political scientists should recognize the news media’s central institutional role at the intersection of American politics and American capitalism.

Introduction

This chapter introduces the argument and analyses. It explains the broader political importance of media coverage and public opinion during policy debates. The chapter also discusses how structural and institutional factors in the media system can contribute to often unforeseen or unintended effects on news content, and can ultimately shape the ideological direction of public opinion. It summarizes the book’s data and key claims about corporate news media’s role in rising economic inequality across the neoliberal era, and discusses the broader implications of the book’s argument and evidence for American democracy. The chapter ends by previewing the structure of the book.

“Gipper Sweeps Congress”

This chapter analyzes media content, elite discourse, and public opinion surrounding Ronald Reagan’s 1981 economic plan. It demonstrates that major television and newspaper coverage of this early neoliberal policy significantly favored free-market perspectives that justified economic inequality. It also shows that media outlets marginalized elite and nongovernmental criticism of the Reagan plan. Commercial tendencies of the media system in that historical context are connected to these patterns in the news. Survey data suggest that such media coverage shaped public opinion to support this influential model of regressive tax policy.

What’s New? Media, Public Opinion, and Democracy in the 21st Century

This chapter contextualizes the book’s historical analyses within more recent media developments. It emphasizes the continuing relevance of the book’s analyses of news media and public opinion in the 21st-century technological environment. The chapter connects durable tendencies in corporate news to newer commercial and technological developments in online communication and social media. It explains how emerging forms and uses of media technology often provide new means of influence for corporate media and other centers of concentrated political-economic power. The chapter also presents an empirical analysis of neoliberal news coverage during the 2017 debate over repealing the Affordable Care Act. It ends by discussing possible media reforms that focus on institutional and systemic changes in U.S. political communication.

Framing Inequality at the Ground Level

This chapter demonstrates that neoliberal news coverage of economic and social welfare policy can shape public opinion in politically consequential ways. It presents an analysis of media content during the 2010 debate over extension of the George W. Bush tax cuts that largely confirms the coverage patterns of earlier economic and social welfare policy debates. It follows this analysis with an online survey experiment. This experiment demonstrates significant effects on public opinion generated by narrow issue framing in news coverage of corporate tax policy. The chapter ends by discussing implications of these findings for public opinion, political knowledge, and socioeconomic inequality.

“No One Wants to Change the System as Much as Those Who Are Trapped by the System”

This chapter analyzes media content, elite discourse, and public opinion on welfare reform in the mid-1990s. It demonstrates that major television and newspaper coverage of this historic neoliberal policy change significantly favored neoliberal views and downplayed elite and nongovernmental criticism. The chapter also demonstrates dwindling substance in news coverage of neoliberal policies since the early 1980s. Corporate imperatives in the increasingly consolidated media system and rightward movement in the Democratic Party during this historical period are connected to patterns in welfare news. Survey data suggest that media coverage shaped public opinion to support this paradigmatic neoliberal social policy.

Toward a Critical Understanding of News Media, Public Opinion, and the Politics of Economic Inequality

This chapter sets the conceptual and historical context of the argument and describes patterns of U.S. public opinion that the book seeks to explain. It situates the book’s argument within scholarship on the politics of economic inequality, public opinion, news framing of policy debates, and the political economy of the media. The chapter also develops a new theory of media dynamics. This theory explains how corporate and governmental influences shaped by media policies filter news coverage of economic and social welfare policy issues. The chapter also summarizes the book’s contribution to empirical research on material power in American politics and to scholarship about the tensions between neoliberalism and democracy.