Critical Explorations of Media and Inequality

This book reveals how mainstream media both reflect and reinforce structural inequalities by obscuring systemic causes and framing those most affected through individualized, often stigmatizing narratives.

Media discourses play a powerful role in shaping public understanding of inequality—yet they often obscure, distort, or individualize its causes.
Critical Explorations of Media and Inequality examines how mainstream media systems reproduce and legitimize unequal social structures by marginalizing, sensationalizing, or blaming those most affected. Bringing together leading and emerging scholars, this edited collection explores the persistent gaps, tensions, and ideological forces at work in media representations of class, poverty, homelessness, welfare, and immigration across diverse global contexts. Organized around the themes of changing media work practices, authoritative voices, representations, and implications, the chapters interrogate how neoliberalism and shifting journalistic norms continue to shape—and limit—the public conversation on inequality. Through rich empirical analysis and interdisciplinary insight, this volume offers a timely intervention into the politics of media framing and the structural silences that sustain social injustice.