Trends in Economic Inequality and News Mediascape

Chapter 2 engages with two major background themes: a review of inequality trends and how these are addressed by researchers in the economics field, and, secondly, the contours of change in the news media landscape. The first section reviews a key set of recent contributions in the field of economics on economic inequality. The next section turns to an overview of wealth and income inequality in the four countries that are at the centre of the empirical part of this volume (UK, Germany, Austria, and Ireland). The next two sections are concerned with academic responses to Piketty’s (2014) book and the subsequent academic debate on shifts in policies and institutional settings which can contribute to the reduction of inequality. The latter part of the chapter turn to the analysis of communicative resources, in particular changes in the news media sectors. It examines forms of inequality in ownership structures and concentration trends unfolding within the daily newspaper markets. Chapter 2 also wraps up with some concluding comments.