Information Inequality: How Race and Financial Access Reflect the Information Needs of Lower-Income Individuals

Abstract

The media landscape is more expansive than ever and offers increasingly fast and cheap ways to consume information. However, many racially and economically marginalized communities live in information environments that fail to provide in-depth coverage of critical topics, such as day-to-day finance. I offer an overview of financial access and news deficits to argue that financial institutions and news providers have historically underserved racially and economically marginalized communities, contributing to information gaps in financial news and the need for alternate sources of information. I investigate how the placement of brick-and-mortar fringe economy financial providers, such as payday lenders, affects how people learn about and make sense of their financial options. I show that these sorts of concrete neighborhood characteristics influence how people participate in today’s economy and share information. Because economic participation is an essential element of citizenship, I propose that these kinds of disparities in neighborhood characteristics and financial access should influence the ways in which we conceive of and deliver information to marginalized groups.