Presidential Leadership, the News Media, and Income Inequality

Abstract

Most research on media in the post-broadcast age of politics focuses on how media affect the public, not on the interinstitutional relationships between the presidency and news media. This study tackles this important topic by studying news coverage of and presidential attention to the issue of income inequality. We use web scraping and text analysis software to build a dataset of weekly news coverage from 1999 through 2013, across traditional and nontraditional media, including newspapers, broadcast and cable television transcripts, and online news websites. The data show that presidential attention to income inequality influences the income inequality news agenda across all sources except network television and affects the tone of newspaper coverage. Presidential influence of tone is especially pronounced on income inequality issues that have an international focus. The implications of this paper are significant not only for understanding how media and the presidency interact in the post-broadcast age but also for the prospects for federal policies that may combat income inequality.