The majority of Americans are wage earners. They neither have their own businesses nor help run businesses. Their wages have been more or less stagnant for two decades while the cost of living has risen relentlessly. Now their jobs are being exported and their unions broken, and yet the business section of their newspaper doesn’t interest them as much as, say, sports or obituaries.
Something is wrong with this picture, something verging on hoax. We need to reexamine the history and function of business news, whether it’s the business section of a newspaper or the business segment of a telecast or even publications given over wholly to business.
As newspapers grew from muckraking and often scurrilous weeklies to staid metropolitan and regional dailies in the 19th Century it was thought that their readers would be primarily affluent and literate upper-class citizens, decision-makers. But as the country expanded westward a middle class was created, and this newly affluent and educated middle class was interested in money matters. But it was assumed, wrongly that money matters would never rate high on reader interest indices. As we discussed in the last segment of this series, that’s not true. Disasters and money rank Number One and Number Two among reader preferences. Read more
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