Journalism and class

From The McDonald's theory of why everyone thinks the economy sucks by Nate Silver.  The subheading is Americans are spending as much of their paychecks as ever on fast food — and everything else.

The mainstream media has been working hard to advance the message of a booming Bidenonomics economy where inflation is in the rear view mirror and everyone doesn't understand just how well they are doing.  The MSM is hot on the idea that there is a lot of misinformation that it is their duty as administration apparatchiks to correct.  

Silver, in his usual data-based fashion explores the issue.

I eat fast food.

Not often, but also not rarely. Maybe once or twice a month in a late-night munchies context. Maybe another couple times when I’m at an airport or something. And I don’t just eat at the highbrow “fast casual” restaurants like Shake Shack, although I like them. I am also well-acquainted with the Taco Bell menu.

I wonder how often Jeff Stein and Taylor Lorenz — the authors of a recent Washington Post story on customer perceptions about the economy — eat from chains like McDonald’s and Taco Bell. I’m guessing it’s not very much.2 Because despite their attempt to frame consumer perceptions about high fast-food prices as “misinformation”, it’s in fact a category where there’s been a big increase in how much consumers are spending, and one that tells us a lot about why Americans are unhappy with the economy overall.

Here’s their story. An Idaho man posted a TikTok video of a McDonald’s order of a burger, fries and a Sprite that cost $16.10. What Stein and Lorenz want you to believe3 is that people are being misled by videos like these. The man ordered a “novelty item”, they say — a limited edition smoky double quarter pounder BLT (sounds yummy). But a Big Mac is much cheaper, they say:

The average Big Mac nationally as of this summer cost $5.58, up from $4.89 — or roughly 70 cents — before Biden took office, according to an index maintained by the Economist. That’s up more than 10 percent, but it’s not $16.

This is a weird and somewhat non-sequitur framing. For one thing, there actually has been quite a bit of inflation in Big Macs. According to the data they cite, Big Mac prices increased by 14 percent over the wo-and-a-half year period from December 2020 through June 2023. That’s not that bad compared to other goods and services; the overall consumer price index (CPI) increased by 16 percent over the same period. But, it’s still pretty high, and Big Mac prices had been fairly steady for years before 2020.

Also, since Stein and Lorenz are accusing consumers of falling for a cherry-picked data point — the Idaho man’s order — it’s worth noting that prices in the broader category of food away from home have grown faster than inflation overall, increasing by 18 percent over that window. It shouldn’t be hard to understand why people are unhappy about that.

That’s not the most important point, though. Instead, it’s something a little more subtle: people aren’t just paying more, they’re spending more. Put another way, they’re not just paying more for the same basket of goods — how the government defines inflation — they’re also putting more and more expensive goods in their basket.

It is a worthwhile read because it is both nuanced and consequential.  

He does not focus on the other implication which is that much of the misreporting from the mainstream media might not be primarily due to ideological fervor or ignorance (though those traits are probably contributive.)  

There has been, in the past three decades, more and more of a class divergence between the remaining journalists and the American public.  Journalists increasingly tend to be from privileged backgrounds, have elite university educations, live in big cities, cobble together reasonably high incomes, hobnob with the well endowed and the well-placed.  As Silver hints, Lorenz and Stein are not of the same class of those experiencing the type of inflation which most Americans experience.  In some ways this a rehash of the kerfuffle in 2017 when it became apparent how foreign pick-up trucks were to journalists despite pick-up trucks being the largest category of vehicle sales in America.  

We need more class diversity in our newsrooms and there are plenty of candidates whose positions might be more usefully filled by people with different class markers (and more numerate.)