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The analysis of mechanisms so far has centered on implications regarding expected conditional correlations between news tone and varied economic developments. We turn now to a definite type of proof, asking whether the distribution of media attention across economic topics is consistent with our argument. To the extent that journalists seek to report on combination economic growth or contraction, they’re prone to attend intently not only to macroeconomic aggregates but in addition to company performance. A thriving corporate sector is often seen as a key pillar of economic success. In flip, corporate performance, particularly as reflected in share values, is more likely to be much more strongly correlated with the fortunes of the wealthy than with those of the remainder of the population, given the sturdy upward skew within the distribution of share ownership. Can the upward class bias in economic news be explained partially by the news media’s tendency to trace the business cycle?

Yet the more unequally growth is distributed, the less informative aggregate-focused economic news turns into about economic developments affecting lower- and middle-income voters. Non-rich voters are likely, in turn, to turn out to be much less nicely informed about their distributional interests, facilitating additional downstream …