Framing Inequality focuses on the role that the news industry has played in the rise of neoliberalism in the United States since the early 1980s. In it, Matt Guardino asks why middle- and low-income Americans often voice support for economic policies that are not in their immediate self-interest—policies such as President Reagan’s 1981 tax cuts, the replacement of Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) with the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Act (PRWORA) in 1996, and President George W. Bush’s 2002 tax cuts and their 2010 extension. Economic gains from these policies have accrued disproportionately to high-income individuals, and they have increased income inequality. Guardino argues that these policies, therefore, should not be as popular with average Americans as they have been. He contends that news coverage of neoliberal policies has been systematically biased in their favor and that this pattern of coverage explains their appeal among middle- and low-income individuals.

Guardino draws on a range of well-known lines of scholarship—including literature on issue framing effects, media indexing, news slant, and the commoditization of the news—to build a theory he calls “media refraction.” He argues that corporate profit motives in the news industry, coupled with its deregulation in the 1980s and 1990s, aligned the interests of media organizations with neoliberal policies. This alignment coincided with the emergence of party leaders on the Right and Left who supported—or at least voted for—neoliberal policies during the Reagan era and later. The theory holds that relatively low levels of elite dissent and the growing influence of corporate power within the news industry resulted in several important changes to the quality and content of news reports about taxes and welfare-state policies: (1) a decrease in hard news focused on these policies, (2) an increase in strategy and tactics coverage (as opposed to substantive policy debate), (3) the marginalization of nongovernmental voices, and (4) an overrepresentation of conservative, neoliberal points of view. This coverage, in turn, he argues, has shaped public opinion in meaningful ways.

To test his theory, Guardino offers two detailed case studies (one on Reagan’s 1981 tax plan and another on the debate surrounding PRWORA), a number of short illustrative examples, and one survey experiment. With the case studies, Guardino documents levels of elite disagreement by analyzing the content of congressional floor debates on the respective policies. He couples this with an analysis of news coverage about the policies from nightly network newscasts, USA Today, and the Associated Press. The combined content analysis from two venues is one of the strongest aspects of the research design: it allows Guardino to assess levels of elite disagreement and to compare them with the ideological slant of news reporting. In the case of the Reagan tax plan, for instance, he finds that the net neoliberal slant in news reports is approximately five points greater than the net slant of congressional speeches—which he argues provides marginal support for the media refraction theory (see p. 90).

Many of the remaining findings from the content analyses serve to reaffirm findings established by earlier studies. For instance, the media’s preoccupation with the strategies and tactics involved in lawmaking and campaigning, and the corresponding marginalization of policy substance, has been demonstrated by numerous authors, including me (e.g., Mary Layton Atkinson, Combative Politics: The Media and Public Perceptions of Lawmaking, 2017; Joseph N. Capella and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, “News Frames, Political Cynicism, and Media Cynicism,” Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 1996; Claes de Vreese, Framing Europe: Television News and European Integration, 2003; Robert H. Durr, John B. Gilmour, and Christina Wolbrecht, “Explaining Congressional Approval,” American Journal of Political Science, 41 [1], 1997; Lawrence R. Jacobs and Robert Y. Shapiro, Politicians Don’t Pander: Political Manipulation and the Loss of Democratic Responsiveness, 2000; Jonathan S. Morrison and Rosalee A. Clawson, “Media Coverage of Congress in the 1990s: Scandals, Personalities, and the Prevalence of Policy and Process,” Political Communication 22, 2005; and Thomas E. Patterson, Out of Order, 1993). Many of these same authors have tested the impact of such coverage on public opinion. The reliance of the news media on government sources is also well established. In short, although the two main case studies elucidate a great deal about the contours of these particular policy debates, they offer few novel findings about the general character of public affairs reports.

The reliance on a handful of case studies that examine the debates surrounding neoliberal policies also leaves a number of the author’s key theoretical expectations untested. For instance, an important part of the media refraction theory is that neoliberal policies align with the priorities of media corporations. This implies that neoliberal plans should receive more favorable coverage than do progressive ones. It also implies that tax and social welfare plans are especially conducive to media refraction and the types of coverage that result from it. Both of these expectations are easily tested. The addition of analyses examining news coverage of progressive plans and policies outside the realm of taxes and social welfare would allow for a much more robust test of the author’s theory. In short, Guardino offers a well-developed and clearly articulated theory, coupled with detailed analyses of the rhetoric surrounding two major policy changes. I look forward to seeing future work from him that further tests his theory’s implications.

Whereas Framing Inequality focuses on the coverage of neoliberal policies, Fox Populism: Branding Conservatism as Working Class, takes a different approach to understanding the working-class appeal of conservative policies. In it, Reece Peck makes a compelling argument that the class-conscious, populist style developed by Fox News is as appealing to its viewers as is the conservative rhetoric espoused by its opinion hosts. Moreover, he argues that the two are so inextricably linked that “Fox’s style is its politics” (p. 18). Through a careful review of the literature on populist appeals, an historical analysis of the network’s inception, and a close textual analysis of the network’s top shows, Peck demonstrates the ways in which Fox sets itself apart from its competition by appealing to working-class tastes and forging disparate groups into a cohesive audience by offering them a common enemy.

The book begins with a discussion of Fox News’s predecessors, including both print and televised tabloid news programs, as well as failed conservative news networks. Much of this historical background is drawn from the biographies of News Corp founder Rupert Murdoch, former Fox News CEO Roger Ailes, and longtime Fox News personality Bill O’Reilly. Here, Peck builds an argument that Fox combines populism with tabloid journalism in a way that links political conservatism and white working-class taste. This involves the rejection of aspirational “middle-brow” culture—centered on critically acclaimed film, literature, music, and cuisine—and an embrace of pop culture staples like country music, reality TV, sports, and chain restaurants. (Indeed, Peck notes that on his show, Bill O’Reilly once declared, “I eat at Red Lobster. I like Red Lobster” [p. 141], as a means of establishing his working-class background.)

In cultivating a style that appeals to blue-collar Americans, Murdoch created a brand that deliberately stands apart from elite, professional, cosmopolitan news sources (like CNN and the New York Times). Opinion hosts on Fox News routinely point out that these outlets and their liberal political allies treat non-college-educated, conservative Americans as uninformed “rednecks” and “bumpkins.” Criticism of Fox News from these news outlets has, therefore, only served to demonstrate to working-class Americans that Fox is the news organization for people like them—regular, working “folks.” The converse is also true. News sources that employ professional journalistic norms of “balanced” reporting are often perceived as being biased in the liberal direction, in part because of their style (rather than their content). As Peck explains, the urbane professional style employed by elite news sources (which Fox News hosts and other conservative elites often lambast as being condescending and snobbish) has become conflated with ideological liberalism. In short, these outlets are portrayed as a foil for Fox’s blue-collar conservatism.

Peck’s theory is nuanced, rich, and compelling. He seamlessly weaves together countless strands of literature from an impressive array of different disciplines to create a cohesive narrative. In doing so, he does not neglect the race and gender implications of the style developed by Fox. His second chapter includes a section where he explains why people of color and women have difficulty cultivating the populist, blue-collar, “everyman” persona typical among Fox News hosts. He also carefully dissects the ways in which racial identity, social identity, and economic class are related and yet distinct—and argues that Fox’s class-based appeals are not synonymous with racial appeals.

The one area where Peck provides little detail is in the discussion of his research methods. Peck conducts close textual analysis of Fox’s top three shows during 2009 and 2010 (Hannity, The O’Reilly Factor, and Glenn Beck). Yet he provides no details about the data collection process or sampling method. Peck does not report the number of episodes of each show he analyzed or explain how he selected them, which left me with questions about the generalizability of the findings. Additionally, Peck includes discussions of a number of shows other than the ones identified as the subject of his analysis, including The Rachel Maddow Show and Anderson Cooper 360, which air on rival networks (MSNBC and CNN, respectively). To his credit, these additions allow Peck to discuss both the content and style of opinion-based programs across networks, which adds to the richness of his analysis. But it is unclear whether the examples taken from these additional sources were gathered systematically or whether they were handpicked. Finally, Peck does not discuss whether the particularities of the time period he analyzes—the first two years of President Obama’s first term, which included the Great Recession, the passage of the Affordable Care Act, and the rise of the Tea Party movement—could have influenced his findings.

Even with these omissions, Fox Populism is mandatory reading for media and politics scholars and for graduate seminars in the subfield. Political practitioners, especially those on the Democratic side of the aisle, will also find some guidance in the book’s conclusions. Peck notes that in adhering to a “professional class cultural style,” to which many Americans cannot relate, Democrats and their media partners are ceding blue-collar voters and viewers to the GOP (p. 232). Some high-profile Democrats, most notably Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, already seem keenly aware of this calculus. Whether other Democrats hoping to win their party’s presidential nomination will adopt populist rhetoric in 2020 remains to be seen—but I suspect Peck would encourage them to consider it.