News as a cultural product has earned a place in scholarly research over the past several decades, and media scholars and sociologists have successfully looked at news for ideological content and how news may shape an audience's ideas on politics, gender, and race. But how does news influence an audience's ideas about social structure? Class and News is a multidisciplinary collection of essays examining how the news media treats or neglects this structure in everyday reporting. Are certain stories chosen for their appeal to the upper or middle classes? Are stories of interest to lower class readers/viewers avoided? How are issues of social order reported or reflected in stories that aren't about class? This in-depth work will be a valuable resource for students, scholars, and general readers interested in the dynamics of class and news in the United States.

Until the recent political shift pushed workers back into the media spotlight, the mainstream media had largely ignored this significant part of American society in favor of the moneyed "upscale" consumer for more than four decades. Christopher R. Martin now reveals why and how the media lost sight of the American working class and the effects of it doing so. The damning indictment of the mainstream media that flows through No Longer Newsworthy is a wakeup call about the critical role of the media in telling news stories about labor unions, workers, and working-class readers. As Martin charts the decline of labor reporting from the late 1960s onwards, he reveals the shift in news coverage as the mainstream media abandoned labor in favor of consumer and business interests. When newspapers, especially, wrote off working-class readers as useless for their business model, the American worker became invisible. In No Longer Newsworthy, Martin covers this shift in focus, the loss of political voice for the working class, and the emergence of a more conservative media in the form of Christian television, talk radio, Fox News, and conservative websites. Now, with our fractured society and news media, Martin offers the mainstream media recommendations for how to push back against right-wing media and once again embrace the working class as critical to its audience and its democratic function.

As cash-strapped metropolitan newspapers struggle to maintain their traditional influence and quality reporting, large national and international outlets have pivoted to serving readers who can and will choose to pay for news, skewing coverage toward a wealthy, white, and liberal audience. Amid rampant inequality and distrust, media outlets have become more out of touch with the democracy they purport to serve. How did journalism end up in such a predicament, and what are the prospects for achieving a more equitable future? In News for the Rich, White, and Blue, Nikki Usher recasts the challenges facing journalism in terms of place, power, and inequality. Drawing on more than a decade of field research, she illuminates how journalists decide what becomes news and how news organizations strategize about the future. Usher shows how newsrooms remain places of power, largely white institutions growing more elite as journalists confront a shrinking job market. She details how Google, Facebook, and the digital-advertising ecosystem have wreaked havoc on the economic model for quality journalism, leaving local news to suffer. Usher also highlights how the handful of likely survivors—well-funded media outlets such as the New York Times—increasingly appeal to a global, “placeless” reader. News for the Rich, White, and Blue concludes with a series of provocative recommendations to reimagine journalism to ensure its resiliency and its ability to speak to a diverse set of issues and readers.

The Sinking Middle Class challenges the “save the middle class” rhetoric that dominates our political imagination. The slogan misleads us regarding class, nation, and race. Talk of middle class salvation reinforces myths holding that the US is a providentially middle class nation. Implicitly white, the middle class becomes viewed as unheard amidst supposed concerns for racial justice and for the poor. Roediger shows how little the US has been a middle class nation. The term seldom appeared in US writing before 1900. Many white Americans were self-employed, but this social experience separated them from the contemporary middle class of today, overwhelmingly employed and surveilled. Today’s highly unequal US hardly qualifies as sustaining the middle class. The idea of the US as a middle class place required nurturing. Those doing that ideological work—from the business press, to pollsters, to intellectuals celebrating the results of free enterprise—gained little traction until the Depression and Cold War expanded the middle class brand. Much later, the book’s sections on liberal strategist Stanley Greenberg detail, “saving the middle class” entered presidential politics. Both parties soon defined the middle class to include over 90% of the population, precluding intelligent attention to the poor and the very rich. Resurrecting radical historical critiques of the middle class, Roediger argues that middle class identities have so long been shaped by debt, anxiety about falling, and having to sell one’s personality at work that misery defines a middle class existence as much as fulfillment.

Finally, she explores how news is produced in both print and broadcast media for the vast Latino population in the United States, using a cutting-edge blend of the quantitative and qualitative approaches in her research."--BOOK JACKET.

In Negotiating Opportunities, Jessica McCrory Calarco argues that the middle class has a negotiated advantage in school. Drawing on five years of ethnographic fieldwork, Calarco traces that negotiated advantage from its origins at home to its consequences at school. Through their parents' coaching, working-class students learn to follow rules and work through problems independently. Middle-class students learn to challenge rules and request assistance, accommodations, and attention in excess of what is fair or required. Teachers typically grant those requests, creating advantages for middle-class students. Calarco concludes with recommendations, advocating against deficit-oriented programs that teach middle-class behaviors to working-class students. Those programs ignore the value of working-class students' resourcefulness, respect, and responsibility, and they do little to prevent middle-class families from finding new opportunities to negotiate advantages in school.

This book examines Americans and their beliefs about the class divide in the United States. It argues that Americans’ beliefs about class and the economic divide develop through a multistep process. Economic affluence influences the development of worldview, measured in terms of ideology, partisanship, and self-identified class consciousness. Class consciousness in turn affects how people look at political and economic issues. This book is intended for scholars and students at every level who study inequality from a political, economic, or sociological position, along with general readers with a growing interest in and awareness of the effects of inequality on our democracy, especially in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, the resulting economic contraction, and the protests over racial injustice erupting throughout the world in 2020.