Income inequality and the absence of a Tawney moment in the mass media

In this paper we address the paradox of increasing income inequality and the absence of public mobilization around the issue. As the mass media are our most important source of information on wider economic affairs, we examine the salience and framing of income inequality within major UK and US newspapers over the period 1990 – 2015. Despite an initial surge in media attention and again towards the end of the period, the issues-attention cycle of inequality resembles a hype-cycle that is more common with arcane academic or techno-scientific topics than with social mobilisation. The dominant frames present income inequality as the seemingly inevitable result of globalization, market forces and technological change. No new radical frames of economic injustice have emerged, neither have any new actors, and so policy solutions fall back onto existing left-right approaches.