News Discourse and Power

Critical Perspectives on Journalism and Inequality

Henry Silke, Fergal Quinn, Maria Rieder, Henry Silke, Fergal Quinn, Maria Rieder

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000356397
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Estudios de comunicación

The issue of socio-economic inequality has become an increasingly important question for journalism and the academy. The 2008 economic crisis and the years of austerity which followed exasperated class and regional division and as an even greater economic shock emerges from the aftermath of the Covid 19 pandemic, the role of journalism and the wider media in the production and reproduction of inequality assumes greater importance.

This edited collection includes eight chapters examining instances of where inequality is examined in the media, for example coverage of Thomas Piketty, precarity, corporate tax rates and race-, class- and gender-related issues, in order to address the following questions:

• Does journalism treat the issue of inequality in a satisfactory fashion?

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• Does journalism challenge powerful interests, or does journalism play an ideological role in the reproduction of structures of inequality itself?

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• How do increasingly poor working conditions of journalists impact on the coverage of inequality?

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The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of the Critical Discourse Studies journal.

‘Piketty is a genius, but … ’: an analysis of journalistic delegitimation of Thomas Piketty’s economic policy proposals

Maria Rieder

and Hendrik Theine

ABSTRACT

The continued rise of socio-economic inequality over the past decades with its connected political outcomes such as the Brexit vote in the UK, and the election of Donald Trump are currently a matter of intense debate both in academia and in journalism. One significant sign of the heightened interest was the surprise popularity of Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the twenty-first Century. The book reached the top of the bestseller lists and was described as a ‘media sensation’, with Piketty himself as a ‘rock star economist’. This paper, drawing from a major international and cross-disciplinary study, investigates the print media treatment in four European countries of economic policy proposals presented in Capital. Applying social semiotic and critical discourse analysis, we specifically focus on articles which are in disagreement with these proposals and identify five categories of counterarguments used against Piketty: authorisation, moralisation, rationalisation, portrayal of victimhood and inevitability. Providing textual and linguistic examples we demonstrate how the use of linguistic resources normalises and conventionalises ideology-laden discourses of economic means (taxation) and effects, reinforcing particular views of social relations and class as common sense and therewith upholding and perpetuating power relations and inequalities.

Introduction

Countless anecdotes are told featuring the status and surprise popularity of Thomas Piketty’s bestseller Capital in the twenty-first Century (from here onwards referred to as Capital)as ‘the publishing sensation of the year’ (Giles, 2014, May 24) and Piketty himself as a rock star economist’. Wade (2014), for instance, notes that The Economists’ Bookshop, next to the London School of Economics, says it has never sold so many non-fiction hardbacks in the first months of publication. The nearest competitor is Stephen Hawking’s ‘A brief history of time, from 1988’ (p. 1069). Tapping into and further stimulating interest in socio-economic inequality, Piketty caused much controversy not least with his economic policy proposals, earning himself some depreciating portrayals as a ‘self-proclaimed socialist’ and ‘inequality messiah’. This paper investigates the print media discussion of Piketty’s policy proposals and the argumentative and linguistic resources used particularly by authors negatively disposed towards them. Using a social semiotic and critical discourse approach, the paper looks at these articles by linking journalistic meaning-making strategies to larger economic and ideological discourses.

This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way.

The data we use consist of 41 articles from German, Austrian, British and Irish (thus two different language regions and a mix of bigger and smaller EU countries) daily and weekly newspapers spanning the time period between March 2014 and March 2015. These articles stem from a larger corpus of altogether 329 articles from these four countries. This bigger corpus was, in the context of a major international project on the mediation of Piketty’s C21 in print media, analysed in relation to the (over-time) framing of Piketty’s economic theories, data, methodology, and policy proposals, as well as of social and economic inequality more generally, all with a view of commonalities and differences arising from different political-economic national and institutional settings. An analysis of the entire corpus revealed that a large proportion of the articles (47%) agreed on a general level with Piketty’s problematisation of economic inequality. However, the question of what to do against the rise of economic inequality was highly controversial, and agreement with Piketty’s policy proposals such as higher taxation on income, wealth and inheritances dropped significantly (22%). Following this observation, the above-mentioned 41 articles were selected for closer examination, on the basis of their negative stance towards Piketty’s policy proposals. This research provides important insights not only into how the mediation of economic topics works in the mass media, but also on potential consequences for reception and participation in relation to economic topics in the public sphere.

Using Van Leeuwen’s (2007) legitimation strategies as our main inspiration, we have identified five argumentative categories used to various degrees and frequencies in counterarguments against Piketty: Authorisation, moralisation, rationalisation, portrayal of vic-timhood and inevitability. Providing textual and linguistic examples, we demonstrate how the repeated use of linguistic resources normalises and conventionalises ideology-laden discourses of economic means (taxation) and effects, reinforcing particular views of social relations and class as ‘common sense’ and therewith upholding and perpetuating power relations and inequalities. We situate this article in literature that approaches the economy and public economic debates from a critical discursive perspective, fitting with scholarly work in the fields of discursive economics, cultural political economy, critical discourse studies and discursive political economy. Relevant work in this area includes: an analysis of discursive legitimation strategies within the Eurozone crisis (Vaara, 2014), an examination of discursive struggles within current inequality-debates including Malthu-sian framings of poverty and welfare-dependence in Britain (Thomas, 2016), and a study of the mediatisation of the super-rich (Jaworski & Thurlow, 2017). Additionally, there has been an increased focus on the roles economists play in public economic discourses. As ‘universal intellectuals’ (Maesse, 2015), economists are often found to use a ‘common-sense’ rhetoric appealing to the public morale and common knowledge of the people. Combined with their distinguished social position, they act as authoritative actors legitimising and perpetuating dominant discursive ideas such as austerity as a crisis solution. Likewise, research on the post-financial crisis discourse shows that economists had a significant influence on the public interpretation of such crisis phenomena as extra-ordinary and abnormal events, thereby suppressing alternative discursive framings (Pühringer & Hirte, 2015). Others show that - even though economics has been subject to criticism in the aftermath of the financial crisis - it remained stable in discursive terms (Dimmelmeier, Hafele, & Theine, in press; Fitzgerald & O’Rourke, 2016).¹

Along the same lines, this paper aims to uncover normalised discursive and legitimation strategies in public economic debates, with a particular focus on economic policies. We start by providing a brief background to the Piketty debate, presenting his main theories and their representation in print media. This leads us to a discussion of the value of social semioticand critical discourse analysis in this context and of the communicative strategies used for the legitimation of particular economic stances. We end with remarks on two major themes arising from our discussion of findings, which provide evidence for the conventionalisation and perpetuation of neoliberal economic thinking.

Capital in the twenty-first century and the Piketty debate

Capital in the twenty-first Century is the result of 15 years of academic research carried out by Thomas Piketty and colleagues, revolving around the evolution of long-term wealth and income inequality. Starting with France, Piketty, in collaboration with colleagues such as Anthony B. Atkinson and Emmanuel Saez, studied the historical development of income and wealth distribution using data from tax statistics of over 20 countries. The main empirical contribution of this approach is to lay bare the U-shaped long-term development of wealth and income inequality. Both have been high at the end of the nineteenth century with 40% to 50% of income and 80% to 90% of wealth concentrated in the hands of only 10% of society. After a period of lower concentration between 1914 and 1970 (the ‘golden age of capitalism’), wealth and income inequality are on the rise again since the 1980s. Those developments, according to Piketty and Saez (2014), by no means originate from natural circumstance: ‘[...] economic trends are not acts of God, [...] country-specific institutions and historical circumstances can lead to very different inequality outcomes’ (p. 838). In other words, the magnitude of the wealth and income concentration is largely influenced by political processes, different forms and levels of taxation as well as period-specific Zeitgeists.

The central message particularly emphasised in Capital then is that if current trends continue, the future distribution of wealth and income will resemble that of the beginning of the twentieth century, a period which Piketty (2014) refers to as a ‘society of rentiers’ (p. 276) and a ‘society of supermanagers’ (p. 278), as social status depended almost solely on wealth and inheritance rather than on work and personal achievements. This not only jeopardises the collective imaginary of meritocratic ideals which western democratic societies are supposedly built on, but also puts the legitimacy of prevailing forms of liberal democracy at risk (Piketty, 2014).

Particularly relevant for the article at hand are the policy proposals that Piketty (2014) lays out in the last part of his book. Tackling the threats that the supermanagers and rentiers as the ‘enem[ies] of democracies’ (p. 422) pose to modern societies, Piketty proposes to reform current forms of taxation as a means of redistribution and end the inegalitarian spiral of wealth and income concentration. He proposes top income taxes of 80% starting from annual salaries of €500.000 and above. Further measures proposed are minimum wages and a re-regulation of the financial system. Regarding wealth inequality, Piketty envisions a global capital tax of 1% or 2%, although he recognises the obstacles to its implementation.

A first signifier of the popularity and controversy of the book in the academic world is the 1300 citations on google scholar by journal articles and working papers since its release in May 2014. Other indications of the impressive impact of Capital in academia are symposia which several leading international journals in and outside of economics have published on the book.² Within communication sciences and political economy of the media, Preston (2016) and Fuchs (2014) provide longer standalone articles on the book. King (2017), in his survey of the post-Piketty literature, shows that the supporters and critics are many and various. Particularly relevant for the present article is the intense criticism that has been voiced especially against policies proposed by Piketty. Main lines of criticism argue that his proposals are a) politically unrealistic, naïve and impractical, b) undesirable as they reduce the dynamics of capitalism and thus adversely affect rich and poor alike, c) unnecessary because alternative policies will produce the desired effects and, finally d) insufficient as they leave capitalism unchallenged or inadequately reformed.

Besides its reception in academia, Capital has also been described as a ‘media event’ as the book and the issue of socio-economic inequality has been reviewed and discussed numerous times in blogs, newspapers and online media. Wade (2014) suggests that an important factor for the high interest is the timing of the book’s publication as it falls in the changing debate after the 2008 crisis where issues of inequality, secular stagnation and the current trajectories of capitalist developments have become more prominent.

Despite the indisputable popularity and comparatively wide-spread debate on Capital, the reception and assessment in mass media seems rather hostile. Previous research on the media coverage of the Piketty debate points to a reserved but in overall positive reception when it comes to the issue of inequality in general, yet rather reluctant to even overtly dismissive reporting on his policy proposals (Bank, 2015; Bank, 2017; Grisold & Theine, 2018). Bank (2015), for instance, argues for mediation of Capital: ‘[B]ut the intensity with which Piketty’s book has been pulled to pieces in Germany is telling more about German economists and the German business journalism rather than about Thomas Piketty and his efforts’ (Bank, 2015, p. 31, translated by authors).

Social semiotics and critical intertextuality

This paper examines the print media debate of Piketty’s work, particularly his policy pr...