The media whiteness of Social Security and Medicare

ABSTRACT

The mass media often represent black Americans in negative, stereotypical, and inaccurate ways. Scholars know much less about how the media characterize white citizens and the implications of these depictions for public opinion and public policy. In this research, we examine the whiteness of two popular social welfare programs—Social Security and Medicare. We argue that at least part of the popularity of these policies stems from their construction as programs serving white Americans. The media whiteness of these programs creates a positive depiction since many citizens perceive whites as hard-working, intelligent, and deserving of benefits. To examine the portrayal of Social Security and Medicare, we analyze media coverage of these programs in five news magazines between 2007 and 2017. We demonstrate that news magazines portray these well-liked social programs by overwhelmingly highlighting white beneficiaries. Further, the media often depict these white recipients in a sympathetic and positive manner. This is in sharp contrast to media coverage of poor people that disproportionately, inaccurately, and unsympathetically focuses on black citizens.

KEYWORDS:

• Mass media
• whiteness
• racial politics
• social welfare policy

Acknowledgments

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2018 Annual Meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, IL. We thank Ky’la Sims for her research assistance and the Summer Research Opportunity Program at Purdue for supporting Ky’la’s work on the project. We also benefitted from discussing the research with Nadia Brown, Valeria Sinclair-Chapman, and Emily Warter.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. Also see Winter (2006) who proposes that race is fundamental to support for Social Security. He argues that race influences Social Security attitudes because of the way in which a racial schema coincides with a social insurance frame linking Social Security to individual efforts.

2. Analysis of stereotypes of whites based on 2012 and 2016 data from the American National Election Studies. Analysis of perceptions of whites’ commitment to strong families and fair and equal treatment based on data from the 2000 General Social Survey (Smith et al. General Social Surveys, 1972–2016).

3. Note that Bloomberg Businessweek has had that title since 2010. In 2009, the magazine was called Businessweek (one word), and prior to that it was titled Business Week (two words). Here we will refer to the magazine as Bloomberg Businessweek since that is its current title.

4. Taken as a whole, these five magazines had a paid circulation of over 7 million during the time period under study: Bloomberg Businessweek reached 1,009,973 people; the New York Times Magazine had a circulation of 1,147,892; Newsweek had an audience of 1,528,081; U.S. News & World Report had a circulation of 1,269,260 in 2009, and Time had the largest readership with 3,032,581 subscribers (Alliance for Audited Media 2012, 2016; Association of Magazine Media 2009; New York Times Corporation 2015). U.S. News & World Report ended their traditional print magazine in 2010. See Matsa and Shearer (2015) for a general discussion of news magazine sales and circulation.

5. Newsweek Sales 2017. https://www.newsweek.com/sites/www.newsweek.com/files/newsweek_mediakit2017.pdf (accessed November 18, 2018).

6. Bloomberg Media Distribution. https://www.bloomberg.com/distribution/products/magazines/ (accessed November 18, 2018).

7. Specifically, we used these instructions to conduct the Reader’s Guide search: “Do advanced search for ‘social security’ or Medicare as the SU. Click on Boolean/Phrase, Apply related words, and Apply equivalent subjects.”

8. Approximately 20% (30/152) of the stories in these five magazines had pictures of recipients. See the top row of Table 1. Of the 8% of the stories on Social Security or Medicare that did not have pictures of recipients, some stories had no visual images at all, whereas others contained charts or pictures of non-recipients, such as politicians, experts, or doctors. We only coded visual images of recipients as defined in the text. Although stories with pictures of recipients make up only one-fifth of the total stories, we believe they are critical to examine because of the power of these visual images and because we have identified the population of such images in these stories.

9. For a short, but informative piece on the social construction of race, see Hodson (2016).

10. For more on the politics of appearance, see Brown (2014) who examines the ways in which skin tone and hair texture and style influence the experience of Black women state legislators.

11. The data we used to calculate the true characteristics of Social Security recipients are provided in Table 3.C7a of each year’s Annual Statistical Supplement to the Social Security Bulletin (U.S. Social Security Administration 2007–2015). The data we used to calculate the true characteristics of Medicare recipients are provided in Table 8.B4 of each year’s Annual Statistical Supplement to the Social Security Bulletin (U.S. Social Security Administration 2007–2015).

12. The poor/poverty/welfare search terms are not entirely parallel to the very specific policy search terms we use for Social Security and Medicare. Earlier research demonstrates that blacks are even more disproportionately represented in welfare-focused pictures than those on other more sympathetic topics (Gilens 1999, 128) and in stories on welfare compared to stories on the poor in general (van Doorn 2015, 154). Therefore, we do not think the differences in search terms undermine our argument.

13. “Who Put the Black Face on Poverty?” CNN Reliable Sources, 24 August 1997.