Last week, the Economic Hardship Project and the Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences program at Columbia University released a new report: Recognition Without Representation: Working Class in U.S. Print Media 1980-2025
Elena Krumova and her team analyzed digitized copies of the New York Times, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Philadelphia Inquirer, Dayton Daily News, Minnesota Star Tribune, and Chicago Daily Herald, all papers in once heavily-industrialized regions. Searching for the term "working class" outside of obituaries or foreign sources, they asked:
How do American newspapers describe the working class: how do they talk about it, in what contexts, and in what terms?
Since 2015, the researchers found sustained use of the term "working class" but significant shifts from reporting on actual economic circumstances (outsourcing, plant closures, housing costs, labor issues, for example) in particular locations to reporting on "the working class" as an abstract political entity:
Overall, we show that over the last 45 years, the attention to the American working class has shifted from a fragmented, regional topic into a centralized, highly political and cultural identity. Where it is not specifically mentioned in political frames, it is an identity marker for characters and neighborhoods in works of art, rather than in stories about housing, education, work, family, or religious life.
This "working class in the abstract" erases the broad diversity of the actual working class, now that the working class is no longer primarily white male factory workers:
Gender representation is strikingly similar across outlets. In both the NYT and other publications, 50% – 65% of articles leave gender unspecified. Men appear more frequently than women when gender is specified, but women rarely exceed 5% – 7% of coverage in either outlet.
Similarly unspecified are other demographic markers such as race or immigrant status, with the vast majority of articles talking about working class in the aggregate.
In sum, the most common use of the term "working class" in these publications is when journalists or others puzzle about their voting behavior or comment upon a character in literature or theater or movies. Rarely are working-class people speaking about the circumstances of their own lives:
Class identity and particularly working class appears to be something to be analyzed, appealed to, or explained rather than described in situ. It is mainly a political actor and perhaps also a marker of authenticity and character when it comes to the arts, i.e. something that exists statistically and rhetorically but not in any concrete social reality that these actors get to define themselves.
In other words, the working class is talked about more, but described less. It is not centering voices and experiences from communities that can sociologically be described as working class, whether one relies on economic or cultural delineations. The discussion remains at a distance, the identity ill-defined and thin. It will not be right to call this “othering” of the working class, but what we get from the coverage is a hum, a low-level rumbling rather than a full voice.
Krumova does also mention Fox News as broadcast media with tremendous influence over defining a "working class" cultural identity. Their on-air personnel perform not as the wealthy actors that they are but as cultural allies against the educated elite, foreclosing critique of structural inequalities:
What the Fox News hosts did was perform “working class” as a cultural practice while at the same time eschewing topics about economic inequality, affordability, health care, education, and other economic concerns.
The Columbia Journalism Review has an excellent interview with Krumova about her research and the consequences of this shift in media in which working-class people "are primarily viewed through this prism of horse-race politics in media coverage".
Her final recommendation in this interview will be familiar to readers of this site:
News organizations should also look into increasing the recruitment, training, and promotion of journalists with working-class backgrounds, just as was done for increasing the representation for women and minorities—such as recruitment outside the college track and training that doesn’t depend entirely on universities but happens on the job itself.
And to bring this back around to education and class, colleges can also help to serve this cause of broader representation of working-class life in journalism by ensuring that all students graduate understanding class stratification.
But colleges are falling far short when even students from poor and working-class backgrounds are likely to learn little about the structural inequalities shaping even their own pathways to college.
