Reporting on Economic Inequality: Tips from Our Newsletter

November 11, 2021

This headline comes from KPIX, the CBS affiliate in the Bay Area, but it is far from the only time we’ve seen a story about homelessness center those who witness it rather than those who experience it. Framing a story in a way that positions threats to those in luxury condos as the primary impact of homelessness — rather than, say, the lack of safety and support felt by people who are actually experiencing homelessness — misses the point. If journalism seeks to help society deal with its collective problems, focusing on what support is needed by those without secure housing (and why they are not receiving it) is the right place to start.

 

January 13, 2022

The first headline above is from a January 7, 2022 Associated Press story about a Labor Department jobs report. The second headline is from a Washington Post story — also published January 7 about the same exact report. Though both make accurate statements — unemployment did decline, and the economy did add 199,000 jobs — very subtle language choices give them very different framings.

 

April 28, 2022

The headline above, from ABC news, references the 2022 County Health Rankings report published by the University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute. From the story:

It’s crucial to understand how journalists play a role in establishing what is possible in the public discourse. This is a perfect example of two news outlets highlighting the same problem and framing the potential for that problem to be solved completely differently.

 

August 18, 2022

I have tried to ignore the discourse around “quiet quitting” (the act of doing what you’re paid to do, and nothing more; yes it’s poorly named) over the past few weeks. But I couldn’t escape articles by the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Newsweek, ABC News, The New York Post, Refinery 29, HuffPost, Fast Company, Mic, and many more local and digital outlets.

I could write an essay on how the volume and trajectory of coverage of “quiet quitting” illustrates many problems of the news industry. (It followed the same path of so many other social media-mined stories: an explosion of shallow explainer articles titled with anxiety-inducing headlines, all soon to be forgotten. Is that time well spent? Do audiences walk away more informed?) Instead I’ll focus on the ways two headlines framed this “trend.”

I put “trend” in quotes because, while it is a social media “trend,” the spread of worker-focused resistance to capitalist burnout is no fad. In fact, that’s what many of those discussing the idea on TikTok are saying. The headline above from TODAY, however, likens it to any other social trend. Plus, by leaving the content of the discourse a mystery, it creates fear of the unknown. After all, “quitting” “taking over” during a strained labor market certainly sounds serious, especially to those who employ others.

The Independent does its readers a service in the headline above by not only describing the trending topic but by explaining its true nature. It’s about “acting your wage” and rejecting hustle culture, not actually quitting. Which, as many have found during the pandemic, is healthy! Framing such a mentality as mysterious or scary is disingenuous and de facto supports exploiting free labor.

 

August 25, 2022

I typically avoid using examples from Fox News in this space. That’s largely because I agree with media scholar Dan Froomkin that what the channel produces is not accurately described as news but is instead propaganda. It’s also because the juxtaposition such an example would create is often laughably transparent in its partisanship. Today I feel the comparison is worth making.

In August the Biden administration announced its long-awaited student debt plan. The Fox headline above makes no attempt to hide its opinion on the facts of the news. It refers to student loan forgiveness as a “handout,” a term long used to pejoratively describe public assistance. It also chooses to place the announcement against the backdrop of “as national debt soars. ” (This explainer from Quartz shows why the national debt is used as a scare tactic to avoid public spending, if you’re curious.) Fox could have easily chosen to end the headline with “as student debt soars” but that would paint the announcement in a positive light, which is not the goal here.

In contrast, the Washington Post’s headline tells it straight: what’s happening (loan cancellations) how it’s happening (who gets what money) and who’s doing it (Biden). No naked partisan slant to be found.

 

November 3, 2022

Before the U.S. Federal Reserve raised target interest rates in November 2022, CNN and CBS News both previewed the change online. The headline above was featured on CNN’s homepage the afternoon of the announcement. It gets the main point right, of course — the “hike” was historic. But it frames the event as “a problem for Biden,” presumably in that it would impact his approval ratings or his party’s election chances.

That may be true, of course, and considering November’s elections it may even be a relevant point to some. But, as research has shown, reporting that frames public issues as just fodder for the political game sows distrust among the public — in both the news and politicians.

CBS News’s take, below, not only piques the interest of the public by being service-oriented. It also reframes the Fed’s move as one that impacts people over politics. Yes, everything is political; but erasing voters from the conversation is just plain bad for civic engagement.

 

November 10, 2022

Shout out to Rachel Cohen of Vox for tweeting out this image of two similar push notifications from the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post.

Just a few small words make these two framings different. The WSJ says inflation “eased to 7.7%,” putting the current rate in the context of larger trends. This context and the friendly word “eased” puts a rosier spin on the slowing of price increases. The Post, however, put that same number in the context of “defying” the Fed’s interest rate hikes, which were meant to slow inflation — you may remember this happened just a week before.

Which framing is “correct” may depend on your personal experience. Regardless, this juxtaposition shows how two mainstream media publications can frame the same news very differently in just a few words.

 

December 1, 2022

New York City Mayor Eric Adams recently announced a new initiative to address the visibility of homelessness in the city. Both the Washington Post and the New York Times reported on responses to the policy in the headlines below.

The Times’ headline above describes interviews with people experiencing homelessness who had varying reactions to the news. The focus on amplifying the voices of those who may be impacted by this news is certainly a positive.

However, it describes Adams’s initiative as “pushes to remove mentally ill.” The word “remove” is only helpful here if you’re looking to obscure what happens to the people in question once authorities deem them “removable.” People are not simply “removed” from a location without being placed elsewhere. This headline describes the situation like those experiencing mental illness and homelessness are not people at all, but are objects to be swept aside somehow.

The Post’s take, below, explains what removal really means in this scenario: forcible hospitalization. Explaining to audiences the consequences of such a policy — hospitalizing people against their will — is a key part of reactions to this news, and should be emphasized.

Unfortunately, both headlines exclude the word “people,” using the catch-all “mentally ill” to objectify and other a marginalized group. Such dehumanizing language is unacceptable in respectful, accurate coverage. Human-centered language — like “people with mental illness” or “people with mental health disorders” — is always preferred. Remember: longer, accurate headlines are better than catchier, dehumanizing ones.

 

December 15, 2022

The headline above is from the New York Times and describes changes that new owner Elon Musk has brought to Twitter recently. From this headline alone, the changes seem rather boring, business-as-usual stuff: budgets, legal teams and the like.

But if you read the deck or sub-headline which immediately follows, below, you’ll find some very unusual stuff. Twitter is just … not paying rent? And might not pay out severance packages? Excuse me?

For a business owner that isn’t as famous or rich as Musk, those decisions would likely be considered legal and ethical breaches. So it’s quite odd that the Times’ headline and its story refer to these as being done “to cut costs” and written up like your average brief. One can only wonder at how Musk’s power influences this framing of his decisions as normal business operations.

The headline from Insider below more appropriately puts the unusual aspect of this news front and center. (Though it does anthropomorphize Twitter in lieu of laying the action at Musk’s feet.)

 

March 2, 2023

Nearly three years ago, U.S. Congress enacted emergency legislation to provide economic assistance to the many people negatively impacted by the pandemic. This included raising the benefits available to recipients of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. In December, Congress signed into law a spending bill which directed this emergency SNAP distribution to end in March, though federal public health emergency declarations won’t end until May. Research shows the emergency allotments kept 4.2 million people out of poverty in the fourth quarter of 2021, reduced poverty by 9.6% in participating states and similarly reduced child poverty by 14%. An estimated 30 million U.S. residents are expected to have their SNAP benefits cut.

The headline above, from the New York Times, rubs me the wrong way for a few reasons. For starters, it uses “food stamp benefits,” which the government moved away from in 2008 due to stigma, instead of SNAP. Research has repeatedly shown that Americans support “assistance to the poor” much more than they specifically support “welfare,” another stigmatized term. I imagine historic baggage might make “food stamps” function similarly, hence the renaming. Public programs unfortunately often require some linguistic gymnastics (also called the euphemism treadmill) to remove their stigma.

This headline also simply uses the word “end” to describe what’s happening to these benefits. Without ascribing a cause, “end” makes it sound like a natural demise, not the result of choices made by humans. Also, simply referring to those affected as “low-income families” doesn’t give the audience an understanding of the scope of the problem. Finally, there’s the use of “extra,” which by one definition means “additional” but by another means “excessive” or “extravagant.” Money that keeps people from starving is certainly no extravagance. I would’ve chosen a different word.

I much prefer the headline from Kaiser Health News, above. It accurately names SNAP and describes them as “emergency” benefits, not “extra,” which underlines the reason for the initial expansion. It also names the impact of this change in an easy-to-digest way in that it will “threaten food security” for a huge swath of the public. It’s incredibly important audiences understand the domino effect this change will have on their communities.

Finally, this headline uses “cuts” to describe why these benefits are disappearing. “Cuts” implies action and intention. It implies someone (in this case, Congress) had the option not to cut these benefits, but chose to instead. It’s crucial that we link harms like food insecurity to their causes: decision-makers. Remember, we know these benefits kept millions out of poverty. Poverty is a policy choice.

 

April 13, 2023

What do each of the headlines below (from the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, WTOL11, and Axios, respectively) have in common? Each accepts the premise of the U.S. “worker shortage.” You may have heard that businesses are having a hard time finding workers. You may have even heard that “no one wants to work anymore.”

According to the facts we have available, however, that just isn’t true. Recent Labor Department data says nearly 81 percent of workers ages 25 to 54 are employed, the highest share of these “prime-age workers” employed since 2001. So what’s happening?

Well, we live in a capitalist society, where supply and demand rule. A true shortage could be spurred by workers demanding wages that are too high to support business. But we don’t have that problem. “Wages in the U.S. have stagnated since the early 1970s,” CNBC reported last year. Meanwhile, in 2022 U.S. corporate profit margins reached their widest since 1950, “suggesting that the prices charged by businesses are outpacing their increased costs for production and labor,” Bloomberg reported.

The great podcast Citations Needed just released an episode on this topic that’s well worth a listen. The hosts say of the mythical shortage (emphasis mine):

“It creates an inciting incident that sort of justifies these horrible right-wing policies….Basically, the labor shortage as a sort of trope is a skeleton key for whatever horrible anti-worker thing one wishes to jam down people’s throats.”

So how could these headlines improve? For starters, they could stop referring to a “worker shortage” to begin with and explain labor dynamics to their audiences. It’s the news media’s job to deconstruct false narratives like these (that we help create!) so our communities can make informed decisions about their lives. For instance, should the specter of a labor shortage really be used to weaken protections for child labor while violations are on the rise? Several state legislatures think so, apparently.

Instead, we should amplify the heart of the matter: a system of worker exploitation. The headlines above do just that. They’re from local outlets Fox5, ABC7, and WXII12 — and the final example isn’t even from a news outlet! It’s from the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, and it includes surveys and interviews with workers on what they’re looking for. It’s frankly the best human-centered reporting I saw in my search for today’s newsletter. Go figure.

 

September 21, 2023

Recently, I referred to my own focus on the subtleties of news language as sometimes “splitting hairs” and my colleague Gene Sonn generously corrected me. “It’s not splitting hairs, it’s being precise,” he said.

This was on my mind this morning as I encountered the CNBC headline about the United Auto Workers strike below.

The word “because” here made my ears perk up. General Motors and Stellantis are two of the three automakers workers are striking against, so their public statements have emphasized these layoffs as a consequence of those strikes. The strikes are disrupting production lines as intended, which has downstream consequences. In that way, “because” is shorthand for this domino effect.

It’s just one word, but “because” here also subtly assigns complete fault to the strike. However, the strike isn’t happening in a vacuum; it is a response to the wages paid by the automakers. As has been widely reported, the CEOs of Ford, Stellantis, and GM make 281, 365, and 362 times more than their average workers, respectively.

The automakers could choose not to layoff workers during this strike, or end it by compromising with UAW. They have options and they have agency here, regardless of anyone’s opinion of which choices they should make. It’s important that journalists communicate that agency with the nuanced language at their disposal.

To put a finer point on it, an accurate headline could just as easily read, “GM and Stellantis laid off 2,000 workers instead of agreeing to UAW demands” or “GM and Stellantis lay off workers instead of cutting CEO pay.”

Or, like Axios did below, a headline could use the phrase “amid ongoing UAW strike,” which doesn’t note any cause of the layoffs. It merely draws a temporal connection for the reader.

 

September 28, 2023

I tip my hat to writer Joshua P. Hill for the viral tweet that alerted me to this story.

As the old journalism adage goes, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” Fact-checking and corroborating a source’s story are crucial steps in the reporting process.

Yet, all too often, rehashes of public statements are published as complete news stories. The most generous justification for this habit is that what is considered “newsworthy” in these cases is not whether a statement is true, but that the statement was made, or that it was made by an important entity. In that case, the public deserves to know what that entity has said as soon as possible.

The obvious problem here is that if journalists make the argument that anything said by a certain entity is inherently newsworthy, then they are absolved of the need to actually determine whether their claims are true before amplifying them. A statement might not be true, but the fact that the Very Important Person said it is true, so we’re in the clear, so to speak.

That’s how we get headlines like the one from CBS below. Target recently announced that they will close nine of their over 1,900 U.S. stores. Their public statement included the words, “we cannot continue operating these stores because theft and organized retail crime….” Instead of using quotation marks or attribution to couch this statement, this headline uses “because,” which makes Target’s claim read like objective fact.

But it’s not objective fact. It’s a statement made by a large corporation that could be true or false.

Why does the veracity of Target’s claim matter? For the past few years, headlines about rising retail theft have proliferated — including regurgitated corporate statements like these. This coverage has increased public perception that this is a rising threat. This has led lawmakers from California to Pennsylvania to bolster law enforcement and consider legislation that would worsen punishments for perpetrators. In other words, similar claims have impacted public life by shifting resources and laws. We should know whether they’re true — and, as is journalistic best practice, we should not take one source’s word for it.

What other information should be considered alongside Target’s claim? For starters, the latest National Retail Security Survey “found the effect of theft on retailers’ bottom lines is about the same as it has been for years,” CNBC reports. Other research on the topic shows claims of a retail theft crisis are murky at best. CNBC also reports that “Target’s business has struggled for more than a year with company-specific challenges, including a glut of unsold inventory, backlash to its Pride merchandise collection and a pullback in consumer spending.”

It may be impossible to determine the objective truth here — maybe Target has a decision-making paper trail to uncover, or maybe it doesn’t. But that doesn’t mean its corporate statements should be taken at face value and amplified.

The headline from the Washington Post below does a good job of balancing this. The fact is that stores are closing. The reason for doing so is unverified, so it reads that Target “blames” it on theft, leaving the truth up for debate.

 

October 5, 2023

Over 75,000 workers for the Kaiser Permanente health care system began a three-day strike during the first week of October. CBS News reports that it’s the “the largest walkout by health care workers in U.S. history,” and “curtailing nonessential care like routine checkups” for millions.

The New York Times headline below is, of course, technically accurate. But it’s so slim on the details that it’s almost boring. The one “plus” I’ll give it is that it doesn’t assume readers know that Kaiser Permanente is a health care company.

When I read the headline below from CBS News I thought, “That’s more like it.”

For starters, it names the historic nature of this particular strike at the jump. With all the labor headlines in the news this summer, it’s important that audiences get a sprinkle of context where they can.

Speaking of context, this headline also includes some incredibly important information that the NYT does not: why the workers are striking! Of course, it’s a given that workers going on strike are seeking better conditions. But when such a strike will disrupt operations for many folks outside of its industry, it’s crucial they understand what it’s for. And in this case, it’s likely something everyone can agree on: understaffing in the health care system is no good.

 

November 2, 2023

As the saying goes, “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Sadly, this rings true for journalists who haven’t learned the lessons of prior coverage and its criticisms.

Back in 2005, in the wake of Hurricane Katrina, two wire service photos of the resulting crisis sparked a conversation on language and framing. The Los Angeles Times recounted the story in 2017:

“One from Associated Press photographer Dave Martin showed a young black man wading through water while holding a bag and a case of soda. The accompanying description stated that he was ‘looting.’ A second photo from Chris Graythen for Getty Images showed a similar scene, but this time it was a white couple clutching bags of food. Their actions were labeled as ‘finding.’”

The difference in these terms is the level of sympathy elicited for the subject. “Looting“ implies criminality while “finding” in this context implies innocently gathering goods for survival. Based on U.S. history, I think I can reasonably suggest systemic racism played a role in the labels given to each photo.

I use this example pretty frequently in my workshops on news and language. You may understand, then, why the headline from Politico below caused me dismay.

The humanitarian crisis in Gaza is well documented. More than 8,000 Palestinians have been killed in the past few weeks and innocent civilians are in dire need of aid. Using the word “loot,” traditionally defined as pillaging for the spoils of war, is an incredibly cynical and unsympathetic way to frame people stealing for survival.

I much prefer the simple rephrase used by CNN in the headline below. “Take” is a pretty neutral verb in this situation; it doesn’t imply criminality but does suggest the goods weren’t willingly given. The use of “basics” underlines the life-sustaining nature of the items people were searching for.

The final example below, from the BBC, I think does the best job of illustrating how dire the situation truly is. It uses the phrase “break into” to imply that the actions described may not have been lawful, but still manages to focus on the real story here: people are desperately searching for aid. This isn’t stealing for stealing’s sake — as we might think of with the word “looting.”

This headline doesn’t sensationalize the events it describes by centering crime. Its priorities are clear: audiences need to understand how bad things really are. It’s the difference between, “Look, these people committed a crime” and “Look, things are so bad these people had to commit a crime to survive.”

 

June 13, 2024

The first pair of headlines below — from CNN and The New York Times, respectively — are about the same announcement from the Federal Reserve. They provide a striking juxtaposition of how syntax and adjectives can create completely different tones for the same set of facts.

CNN notes that unchanged interest rates are at a “23-year-high” and that this has remained so through the Fed’s last seven meetings. Phrases that emphasize record heights and stagnation are meant to telegraph that this is bad news, whether you know much about interest rates or not.

On the other hand, the Times uses “steady” to describe that same length of time and lack of change. One could be forgiven for assuming the positive denotation of the word “steady,” which is often a pleasing attribute in a person or thing. If the reader was less financially savvy about the “rates” noted here and the Fed’s previous promise of several cuts, “steady” paired with “only one cut” may sound like good news.

Who is to say what the headline writers intended for these stories? Either way, it’s always interesting to see how small choices create different experiences for the reader.