Stagnation, Social Tensions, Unfairness

Chapter 8 provides an analysis of the subset of news media discourses which argued that inequality is a problem, clearly an important category for the examination of the overall media debate on Piketty’s book. Those discourses centre around considerations of fairness, frequently focusing on political and economic consequences. All relevant articles treating inequality is a problem are subject to focused analysis, whilst a detailed analysis is undertaken in the case of a subset of highly relevant texts. The authors also observe and address various significant silences in the corpus of newspaper articles, a concept derived from prior critical cultural, linguistic, and discourse studies. This refers to important themes or issues which are ignored in the newspaper texts but which would be reasonably considered decisive factors when discussing growing inequality. Table 8.1 provides an overview of the main results of coding and analysis of the discourses in all those newspaper articles in the corpus which provide, define and treat inequality as a problem. As they comprise a significant share of coded segments, the authors then concentrate on the most frequent and relevant news texts for a more elaborate analysis. The chapter proceeds to examine both the obvious and the subtle ways in which these newspaper article set about constructing economic inequality as a problem. The final sections further consider and discuss the key findings in relation to theoretical considerations.