Framing Income Inequality: How the Spanish Media Reported on Disparities during the First Year of the Pandemic

Abstract

This paper addresses the problem of how Spanish digital media reported income inequality during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. In this way, the goal was to study the framing of definition, contextual aspects, and depth. For this article, a tool was designed to analyse the content of the items. An analysis of news published by six digital media in Spain from March 2020 to February 2021 was conducted using content analysis. Within a sample of 2727 media stories in which there was a connection between the coronavirus and inequality, a stratified sample was used (n = 958) according to the content production by quarter and by media. The results of this study show that income inequality was the most common type of inequality reported in the media, and they cantered more on the micro level. Also, it appeared to be linked to the social gap and showed poverty as the main consequence. The frame was focused on social issues, international and national contexts, and expert sources. Finally, different levels of depth can be observed in the news items analysed, depending on the frame.

1. Introduction

In 1971, Simon Kuznets was awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel in recognition of his empirical contribution to the interpretation of economic growth. His research made possible a new and deeper vision of the economic and social structure and the development processes linked to them (Lindbeck 2001). In summary, he measured the impact of income inequality on a country’s economic growth. We already had the famous Kuznets curve (Ekins 1997; Dinda 2004; Stern 2017; Ravallion and Chen 2022) and a seminal concept of the 21st century: income inequality.

Four decades later, it is usual for the idea of income inequality to appear in the political sphere and mass media. In 2015, the United Nations approved the Sustainable Development Goals, which consist of seventeen objectives to transform our world, to make it better, “to promote prosperity while protecting the planet” (UN n.d.). The first goal is to abolish poverty; the last one is to develop partnerships for achieving the goals; and in tenth position, we find the goal to reduce inequalities. Governments around the world are striving to achieve these goals. For example, in Spain, it is the Ministry of Social Rights and Agenda 2030 (n.d.) that defines the 2030 Sustainable Development Strategy to comply with the Development Goals. This includes accelerating policies and action priorities that are required to comply with the 2030 Agenda as well as developing a system for monitoring progress in these. One of these priorities is, again, to reduce income inequality. It is noteworthy that Spain is one of the European states with the widest gaps between the salaries of its population, which is reflected in the Gini coefficient. In 2019, Spain scored 34.3 on the indicator, a far cry from the 24.4 of Slovenia, the Eurozone country with the best data (World Bank n.d.). Nevertheless, the average wage in Spain is ostensibly higher than in Slovenia. Therefore, Spain has the third highest value in the Eurozone, ranking among the countries with the highest wage inequality.

Currently, in this context, the global pandemic has made the poor poorer (Dizioli et al. 2020). In Spain, poverty has increased. For the first time since the pandemic began, there are official income data that take into account the impact of COVID-19 on Spanish households. The Living Conditions Survey of the National Statistics Institute (NSI 2022) has confirmed the worst estimates of the last two years: the percentage of the population at risk of poverty or social exclusion has increased and now stands at 27.8%, which is the highest rate since 2016. Likewise, the coronavirus crisis has conditioned the media’s own treatment of inequality since 2020 (Masip et al. 2021; Odriozola-Chéné and Pérez-Arozamena 2022a; Van Aelst and Blumler 2021).

The aim of this article is to shed some light on how the media, specifically in Spain, treated the increasing income inequality during the COVID-19 pandemic. Therefore, it is necessary to consider that the media have historically influenced the economic policies to confront inequality (Guardino 2019). In addition, due to journalistic routines, the media rely on information sources that, depending on their position on this situation of inequality, use positive or negative frames (Dover 2022).

This research seeks to know how, in the context of a new situation, COVID 19, which has increased the problem of inequality, the media define it and what aspects resulting from journalistic routines affect this process of conceptualisation.

1.1. Inequality and Media

Between 1971 and 2015, the problem of income inequality increased, at least in terms of its visualisation in the media, in the 1980s (“media is a key dimension of global inequality” as stated by Couldry and Rodríguez 2016), following the advance of economic liberalism and the deregulation of financial markets established by the governments of Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in the United Kingdom. After that, media focus disappeared until 2007–2008, when the issue of economic and social inequalities slowly regained mainstream political and media attention in Western capitalist countries (Preston and Silke 2017; Odriozola-Chéné et al. 2020). We set the start date as 2007–2008, because that was the largest global economic crisis in recent history (Erkens et al. 2012), known as the Great Recession (Mussida and Sciulli 2022). The work of economists such as Joseph Stiglitz (2012), Branko Milanovic (2012), and Thomas Piketty (2013) has brought the concern about inequality between countries and, even more so, between social groups and classes, to the forefront of current affairs.

However, the attention on any topic fluctuates over time (Downs 1972), and when the financial problems were overcome, the media’s attention disappeared once again until March 2020 (Carlsson-Szlezak et al. 2020; Tooze 2020). Only three months after Chinese authorities reported a new coronavirus disease, which would become known as COVID-19, the WHO declared a global pandemic (Legido-Quigley et al. 2020). The famous COVID-19 has caused dramatic changes in the health system, which has influenced not only the economic world order (Ito 2020; Nicola et al. 2020; Wójcik and Ioannou 2020) but also the media landscape (Fletcher et al. 2020; Serrano-Tellería and Díaz-Noci 2020). It was then that interest increased dramatically once again, and income inequality became a trending topic as a consequence of the pandemic (Buklemishev 2020).

Although the concept of economic inequality has been present in the academic world for a long time, its relevance in society, and therefore its importance, has increased over time. As explained above, there have been a few historical moments of peak interest: First, the 1980s, and then the 2008 and 2020 crises. Thus, the concept of income inequality has been constructed from different perspectives. The Model of Ideology Diffusion explains the cycle, which starts in academia, then politics, and then the ideology arrives to the broader media. According to Strodthoff, Hawkins, and Schoenfeld, in a first phase, a disambiguation of the problem is necessary to obtain a better definition of it (Strodthoff et al. 1985, p. 135). During this phase, actors who are explaining the idea are focused on specialised media. Therefore, in this phase, the aim is to increase the visibility of the problem and also reach a specialised audience. In the second phase, the problem is legitimised and transferred to the agenda of the mainstream media to persuade a wider audience of its relevance. Then, in the third phase, the relevance of the topic increases, and the topic’s ability to access the agenda does not depend exclusively on the development of specific events linked to it. Throughout this process, the message evolves according to three levels of abstraction: (a) general, which is focused on defining the problem and its importance; (b) doctrinal, which defines the foundations of the problem, its causes and consequences; and (c) substantive, which is established to address priority or substantive issues (Strodthoff et al. 1985, pp. 140–41).

In order to understand the process of disambiguation of inequality, it is necessary to consider the influence of the new hybrid media system (Chadwick 2017) and how in the digital landscape, legacy media gives voice to social actors who, historically, had not had an important role in the media agenda due to the hegemony of political sources (Bennett and Livingston 2003; Entman 2004; Gans 1979). Thus, the emergence of new spaces such as blogs facilitates the incorporation of new actors, which can modify the definition of inequality in the media.

1.2. Framing Inequality

The issues reported by the media are defined and characterised as they are developed in their news; in other words, when the media report on an event, they frame it. The framing theory refers to this ability to define and fix the public’s attention on a specific way of understanding social problems (Scheufele 1999). Thus, through the selective exposure of some specific aspects and through the repetition of these frames, a way of understanding the social reality is reinforced (Entman 1993). For this purpose, the media rely on aspects connected to the newsworthiness of the issues (Harcup and O’Neill 2001, 2017; Galtung and Ruge 1965), but also by other influences present in the journalistic production process (Shoemaker and Reese 2014).

An audience’s understanding and evaluation of public affairs are determined not only by the topics that become news, but also the framing effects. “These occur when (often small) changes in the presentation of an issue or an event produce (sometimes large) changes of opinion” (Chong and Druckman 2007, p. 104). To understand journalistic texts, it is important to understand how they are crafted by professionals who provide a framework for the audience to interpret the texts (Druckman 2001). Hence, media and journalism play a critical role in the production and reproduction of any topic, even inequality (Guardino 2019; Petrova 2008; Silke et al. 2019). For example, Rieder and Theine (2019) found how Piketty’s economic policy proposals were delegitimised in four European paper media.

In short, framing “is an invitation, an incentive, to read a news item in a certain way” (Ardèvol-Abreu 2015). But, framing, as a strategy for producing influence, or political capital, also involves choosing the right path for delivering information to policymakers (Gandy 2016). Lastly, framing refers to the organisation and structure of information in three areas: (1) the problem; (2) the parties responsible for that problem; and (3) the solutions (Entman 1993). Furthermore, it is remarkable that scholars draw a “framing pool” composed of various frames to analyse any cross-national issue. Thus, there are three categories in this framing pool: (1) generic frames, applied across issues and regions; (2) domestic frames, used in a different way across countries when similar or identical issues are covered; and (3) issue-specific frames, applied exclusively to an issue (Guo et al. 2012, pp. 1924–27).

Income inequality has been, to this point, more than sufficiently defined. However, for this research, it is important to remember that, traditionally, income inequality between nations/countries has been differentiated from that which refers to the variations in the standards of life quality between citizens (McKay 2002; Hulme and McKay 2013). The first case, the global one that focuses on nations (Anand and Segal 2008; Milanovic 2012; World Economic Forum 2021), is included in other concepts, such as globalisation, the wealth of countries, and poverty (Brett 2009; Seligson and Passé-Smith 2008). However, inequality between citizens is related to the disparity that leads to some individuals having access to certain living conditions, while others do not (Ray 1998, p. 170). Usually, the latter is linked to issues of public health (Arcaya et al. 2015), education (Rodríguez-Pose and Tselios 2009), violence, social mobility, sustainability, and poverty (Redden 2011). Therefore, inequality of opportunity is also a main topic in relation to gender, family, education, social class, and especially place of birth, which are related to income disparity (Pérez-Mayo 2019). Therefore, there are socio-economic issues, such as lack of education, cultural and religious discrimination, overpopulation, unemployment, and corruption, that have an impact on economic activity (Kirilova 2018). In addition, Therborn (2013) believes inequality has a deep connection to other phenomena. According to this author, inequality goes beyond money, income, and wealth resources. He argues that a socio-cultural order creates inequality and affects our health, our self-respect, our sense of self, and our abilities to act and participate in our world (Therborn 2013). Therefore, researchers have examined what contributes to reducing this inequality. Generally, they distinguish negative forces, such as wars, civil conflicts, and epidemics, from positive ones, such as politics, public education, and access to healthcare or technological changes (Milanovic 2016).

This gap even goes beyond the strictly material to the symbolic, a field in which the media play a decisive role (Lindell 2020). The role of the media and economic inequality has begun to be decisively researched during the last two decades, as we have reflected in several previous contributions (Pérez-Arozamena and Odriozola-Chéné 2020; Pérez-Altable et al. 2020). This research has followed an academic tradition initiated by, for example, Petrova (2008), Redden (2011), Byrne (2012), Bandyopadhyay (2014), and Duca and Saving (2017) to understand how inequality is defined by media, in this instance, in relation to the global event of the last decade: the coronavirus crisis.

1.3. The Spanish Media System

To truly understand how Spanish media covers stories, it is essential to examine its structural foundations. The media landscape in Spain is characterised by two primary forms of ownership: public and private. Public broadcasters like RTVE (Radiotelevisión Española) are government-funded entities that prioritise news and cultural programming. Conversely, private enterprises such as Mediaset España and Atresmedia dominate the commercial television sector (Medina Nieto and Labio-Bernal 2019). Print media in Spain offers a diverse spectrum, with major newspapers like El País owned by PRISA, ABC by the traditional business VOCENTO, El Mundo by RCS Group, and La Vanguardia by the Catalan family-owned group Godó. Additionally, digital platforms like eldiario.es and elconfidencial.com, operated by independent companies, are increasingly influential, disrupting traditional media dynamics (as observed in Table 1).

Thus, the media system in Spain aligns with the framework established by Hallin and Mancini (2004) in their seminal work Comparing Media Systems, where they classify it under the polarised pluralism model. Recent studies further reinforce this characterisation, indicating a strong governmental intervention and presence, underscoring the prevalence of polarised pluralism with significant state involvement (Fernández-Viso and Fernández-Alonso 2024; Labio-Bernal et al. 2024).

1.4. Research Aim, Questions, and Hypothesis

The aim of this research is, as previously mentioned, to know how the Spanish media reported on inequality in the journalistic stories focused on the coronavirus, in order to be able to go deeper into the conceptualisation of inequality as well as into the elements that influence its definition:

RQ 1

How was inequality framed in the media during the first year of the pandemic according to media coverage?

RQ 1.1

How was inequality defined in the media, from the perspective of issue-specific frames (types of inequality, the associated gaps, the micro/macro frame, and the main consequence of inequality) during the first year of the pandemic according to news coverage?

RQ 1.2

How have other contextual aspects, from the perspective of domestic frames, related to news routines (main topic, the geographical area or the main source), influenced the framing of inequality?

RQ 2

What was the degree of depth of the coverage of inequality, from the perspective of issue-specific frames, by the media analysed during the pandemic?

RQ 2.1

Do contextual aspects (main topic, geographical area, and main source) influence the quality of the reporting carried out?

RQ 2.2

Are there other elements, related to the influences in the journalistic production processes, such as media ideology, authorship, media location or journalistic function, that influence this level of deepening of the coverage?

2. Materials and Methods

This research is based on a quantitative content analysis (Krippendorff 2004) that makes it possible to (a) understand the process of framing inequality within the framework of the pandemic in the agenda of the Spanish online media and (b) determine each story’s level of depth as well as the aspects that influence its media coverage.

For the analysis, we chose six Spanish online media: abc.es, elconfidencial.com, eldiario.es, elmundo.es, elpais.com, and lavanguardia.com. According to Comscore, these were among the most visited online media in the months prior to the analysis (Dircomfidencial 2019). Except for elconfidencial.com and eldiario.es, which are the most read digital-born media in Spain, all the others are online editions of legacy daily newspapers.

The longitudinal study covers the period from March 2020, when the WHO declared the coronavirus crisis to be a global pandemic (Ghebreyesus 2020) and governments, including that of Spain, began to establish measures that would paralyse economic activity (Jones 2020), until 28 February 2021. Thus, a descriptive analysis of a sample of 2727 media stories in which there is a connection between the coronavirus and inequality was carried out to describe the communication and make possible inferences about its meaning (Riffe et al. 2019). The sample was obtained from an advanced Google search in each of the media for the terms “inequality” and “coronavirus”. After this first selection, a manual review of each content was carried out to determine whether the coincidence of these terms was coincidental or causal, eliminating from the population those publications in which the relationship between the two was not direct. Then, a stratified sample of each selected media was used (n = 958) according to the content production by quarter and by media.

The analysis of the news items was carried out by the authors of the article, who, being the designers of the research and relying on a codebook (Odriozola-Chéné and Pérez-Arozamena 2022b), were able to develop a correct coding. In addition, before the analysis of the total sample, the intercoder agreement was calculated using Krippendorff’s alpha index (Krippendorff 2004). The degree of agreement for each variable can be seen below when each variable is mentioned.

To achieve the objectives, we first developed a series of measurement variables: the types of inequality present, i.e., income (α = 0.706), wealth (α = 0.747), opportunities in education (α = 0.907), opportunities in health (α = 0.795), and opportunities in research (α = 0.796); the gaps to which they are linked, i.e., gender (α = 0.796), race (α = 0.823), class (α = 0.665), or age (α = 0.728); the specific frame based on addressing differences between macro- and micro-communities (α = 0.773); and the consequences of inequality with categories such as poverty, political and economic actions, changes in the current social system, others, and none (α = 0.683). These variables were used to determine how inequality is framed in the news according to an issue-specific context and also to create a scale that measures the degree of depth of the coverage of each story.

Moreover, further variables were analysed that help to frame inequality by putting it in context: the main topic (α = 0.739), geographical area (α = 0.822), and the main source (α = 0.753). Finally, some variables linked to the processes of journalistic production have been developed to analyse the news: media ideology (α = 1.000); authorship (α = 0.962); media location (α = 0.896); and journalistic function (α = 0.919). These variables are related to the domestic frame.

The level of depth in addressing inequality is calculated using a scale between 0 and 11 points, based on the presence/absence of each of the inequalities measured (0–5), the presence/absence of each of the gaps measured (0–4), the presence/absence of a geographical context (0–1), the presence/absence of a specific framing (0–1), and the presence/absence of a main consequence (0–1).

The analysis of the results, carried out using the SPSS, combines descriptive statistics to calculate frequencies for nominal variables, as well as means and standard deviations for ratio variables with inferential statistics. Statistics such as chi-squared and ANOVA were applied to determine the level of significance of the relationships detected.

3. Results

3.1. Defining and Framing Inequality

To analyse how the coverage of inequality was framed during the pandemic (RQ 1), it is necessary to contrast how inequality was defined in the news regarding issue-specific frames (RQ 1.1) as we can see in Table 2.

First of all, an analysis of the types of inequality reported in the news shows that income inequality is the most common type in the journalistic texts analysed (68.4%). Other types appeared to a lesser extent: wealth inequality (28.8%), inequality of opportunities in health (23.5%), and inequality of opportunities in health education (21.4%). Inequality of opportunities in research was not addressed by the media (1.5%). During this first year, the news coverage of the different forms of inequalities changed at specific time points. However, a regular increase was only observed from the third quarter onwards (Sep–Nov 2020) in the case of inequality in health opportunities.

These inequalities are focused more on the micro level, i.e., measuring differences between people in the same community (49.8%), than the macro level, i.e., measuring differences between communities (19.5%). However, from the third quarter onwards, as in the case of inequality in health opportunities, the salience of the macro approach increased. It is relevant to highlight that in 22.9% of the news items analysed, neither of the two frames were present.

In terms of the gaps associated with the different types of inequality, the social gap is the most reported in the Spanish online media (41.3%). In second place is the gender gap (20.6%), and to a lesser extent the racial gap (12.9%) and the generational gap (11.6%). The data show that it was more difficult for gender, racial, and generational gaps to capture the media’s attention in the early stages of the pandemic, although their relevance increased as time went on.

Poverty is the consequence linked to inequality most often covered in the news (53.1%) compared to others such as policy and economic actions (13%) or changes to the current social system (5.6%). Again, it should be noted that a high percentage of news items (14.1%) do not include any type of consequence.

Finally, to analyse how news reports define inequality according to these four criteria, it is important to note that 1 in 10 news reports do not refer to any specific type of inequality (10.2%); 4 out of 10 do not refer to any type of gap (40.6%); 2 out of 10 do not identify a specific framework (micro, macro, or both) (21.9%); and just over 1 in 10 do not mention any of the consequences of inequality (14.1%).

Moreover, Table 3 shows how, when inequality is framed, there are other contextual elements connected to domestic frames that have an impact on this process (RQ 1.2) beyond those related to the conceptual definition.

First, it is necessary to consider in which topics inequality appears, in which geographical frame, and also what the main sources of these news items are; in other words, it is important to know the frame from which inequality is reported.

Four topics were the most common: social issues, such as education, health, social mobility, etc. (37.1%); politics, such as political debates, legislative proposals, etc. (21.6%); business/economy (17.8%); and labour, such as wages, unemployment, and work–life balance (15.7%). Moreover, politics is the only issue that decreased in relevance as time went on. There are other news items that focused on other issues where inequality is addressed, but their presence is minimal: science and technology (2%); culture (2%); social demonstrations (2%), safety (0.9%); environment (0.8%); and wars (0.5%).

The geographical context of the news story is also important for understanding the characterisation of inequality. In this case, inequality is reported as an international (36.1%) and national (30.1%) event. Regional (11.9%), EU (5.9%), or local (4.5%) coverage is less important. It is interesting to highlight how, over the months, media coverage of inequality became more internationalised, as the weight of international coverage and coverage of the European Union increased compared to more local, regional, and even national approaches.

Furthermore, it is interesting to observe how expert sources (19.1%) surpass government sources (15.8%), which have traditionally been the most used by the media. Other important sources when inequality was reported were supranational organisations such as the WHO, OECD, and IMF (12.8%) or from other non-governmental organisations or social movements (9.8%). The evolution over the months clearly shows that while there is a decreasing tendency to use governmental sources, there is an increasing tendency to use expert sources and supranational organisations.

3.2. Analysis of In-Depth Media Coverage

The treatment of inequality in the stories analysed ranged from a simple mention of the term to a full development of the different aspects that contribute to defining and contextualising it. In other words, different levels of depth can be observed in the news items (RQ 2).

The depth of inequality coverage in the online media analysed is based on a scale between 0 and 11 points. This scale, as explained above, has been constructed based on the presence/absence of the following: the main social inequalities (0–5 points); the main social gaps (0–4 points); the specific inequality frame (macro, micro or both); and the consequences of inequalities (0–2 points). Table 3 shows the statistically significant differences determined with ANOVA.

Overall, the average score of the analysis is 3.93 (SD = 1.712). The scale measurement shows that the mean relative to the presence of social inequalities is 1.44 (SD = 0.861). The mean related to the presence of social gaps is 0.86 (SD = 0.94). Finally, the mean relative to the presence of specific framing and the consequences of inequality is 1.63 (SD = 0.576).

However, this deepening of inequality coverage is related to the contextual variables through which the issue is presented (RQ 2.1).

First, related to the geographical context of the news, a more global view of inequality is reinforced in the news of an international context outside Spanish and European borders (M = 4.35, s.d. = 1.611). The other geographical frames show a level of depth below the average, and the differences detected are statistically significant (F(5, 592) = 12.347, p = 0.000, n² = 0.061): local (M = 3.77, SD = 1.525); regional (M = 3.90, SD = 1.635); national (M = 3.88, SD = 1.638); EU (M = 3,65, SD = 1.706); and not applicable (M = 2.96, SD = 1.934).

It is necessary to remember that there were four main news topics in which inequality was included: social issues (37.1%), politics (21.6%), business (17.8%), and labour (15.7%). In this variable, statistically significant differences are also observed (F(9, 948) = 6.697, p = 0.000, n² = 0.060), highlighting the coverage of inequality in labour issues (M = 4.43, SD = 1.676), followed by news focused on social issues (M = 4.11, SD = 1.658) and business (M = 4.01, SD = 1.722). Only the news focused on politics showed lower values than the average (M = 3.54, SD = 1.674). This situation also occurs in those topics where inequality is rarely addressed (culture, science and technology, security, environment, etc.). All of these have a lower degree of depth than the average of the analysis.

The depth of coverage of inequality also shows statistically significant differences according to the main source of the news (F(8, 949) = 8.419, p = 0.000, n² = 0.066). It is noteworthy that the more traditional sources in the development of news coverage reflect less in-depth coverage when they are chosen as the main sources: government/MPs (M = 3.72, SD = 1.551) and political parties, trade unions, and business actors (M = 3.64, SD = 1.342). However, other sources that are not so common in the journalistic network show a higher level of depth when they are the main source: non-governmental organisations and other social movements (M = 4.60, SD = 1.996); supranational institutions (M = 4.57, SD = 1.761); civil servants (M = 4.49, SD = 1.721); and independent experts or scientists (M = 4.09, SD = 1.495).

In addition to these aspects, it is necessary to consider the influence of other factors related to journalistic production, such as the ideology of the media, the authorship of the information, the space where the news is placed, or the journalistic function of the text (RQ 2.2). Table 4 shows the statistically significant differences according to ANOVA for these variables.

Regarding ideology, the studied media represented liberal (elmundo.es, lavanguardia.com, and elconfindencial.com), conservative (abc.es), and social-democratic (elpais.com and eldiario.es) ideologies. Although we did not assess the number of news items published according to ideology, as the distribution was not balanced from the outset, it was found that the level of coverage varied according to ideology in a statistically significant way (F(2, 955) = 6.511, p = 0.002, n² = 0.013): liberal (M = 3.70, SD = 1.839), conservative (M = 3.72, SD = 1.309), and social-democratic (M = 4.11, SD = 1.638).

The signature of the news items shows that 43.6% were written by journalists from the media, 23.2% by other non-journalist collaborators, and 26% came directly from agencies. It is not very common to see the media use the corporate signature (6.1%). Unsigned news is an exception in the practice of these digital media (0.9%). The statistically significant differences were maintained in this case (F(4, 953) = 3.387, p = 0.009, n² = 0.014), with a greater depth when the texts come from non-journalist collaborators (M = 4.02, SD = 1.800), journalists from the media (M = 3.97, SD = 1.695), or agencies (M = 3.95, SD = 1.713) compared to when they have no signature (M = 2.36, SD = 0.924) or a corporate signature (M = 3.52, SD = 1.713).

Finally, the variable media locations (traditional sections, supplements/special issues, contents of other publications of the media group, and contributions from other media) and journalistic functions (factual reporting, analysis, and opinion) performed differently. The differences were much higher between the media location categories than in the journalistic function categories. However, in both, the observed differences were not statistically significant (p > 0.05). Table 5 shows these statistically significant differences determined with ANOVA.

4. Discussion

The definition and contextualisation of inequality in the news shows some dominant elements, although the way in which the issue is framed varies over time and also at specific moments in time.

According to the results, as shown in Table 6, when the media mention inequality in relation to the pandemic, they do it from an issue-specific frame, such as income inequality that affects people within a society/community due to a class gap, with the main consequence being poverty.

However, this preliminary statement needs to be clarified. Income inequality is the most common type of inequality highlighted in the news, maintaining its prevalence over the entire analysis period. However, wealth inequality also has a regular presence. Other types of inequalities have a more limited presence, even though there were specific moments in which their visibility increased. For example, inequalities of opportunity in education were more present in the September to November 2020 timeframe, coinciding with the start of the academic year, and inequalities of opportunity in health were more present in the period from December 2020 to February 2021, which coincided with the start of the vaccination process (DW 2020).

Indeed, the definition of inequality changed the most in this last quarter of the analysis, December 2020–February 2021. Firstly, inequality shifted from focusing on differences between members of a community/society (micro inequality) to focusing on differences between communities or societies (macro inequality). This is consistent with the differences in access to vaccines between developed and undeveloped countries (Mathieu et al. 2021; The People’s Vaccine 2020). In fact, the presence of racial and generational gaps in the news also increased in this last quarter of the analysis.

However, the class gap is the most common in stories about inequality, and the gender gap also increased in the second half of the year of analysis in line with the emergence of different research studies which confirmed that the pandemic had also affected the work–life balance of women more than men (Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean 2021; European Foundation for the Improvement of Living and Working Conditions 2020; OECD 2020; United Nations Entity for Gender Equality and the Empowerment of Women 2020).

Meanwhile, the centrality of poverty as the main consequence of inequality remained constant over the entire year. Over the first six months of the pandemic, the development of political and economic changes to deal with the crisis were more present than in the second half of the pandemic. Thus, the news reported on the debates over implementing a series of political and economic policies at the national (Bank of Spain 2020; Government of Spain 2020) and international levels—at the European level in the case of Spain as a member of the EU (Anderson et al. 2020; European External Action Service 2020), but it did not report so much on the subsequent development of these policies through specific actions. Finally, the capacity of the pandemic to build new foundations for the economic and social systems occasionally appeared during the entire analysis period.

However, it must be noted that sometimes the presence of the concept was merely superficial; indeed, not all news reports went in depth regarding the types of inequality, the gaps, the micro or macro frames, or the consequences of inequality. This deeper conceptualisation was related both to contextual elements that help to define inequality and to other more general elements of journalistic production processes.

Concerning the contextual elements, in the domestic frame, as shown in Table 7, when inequality was covered in social and labour topics, the level of depth increased compared to the usually dominant political and economic perspectives (Casero-Ripollés 2009; Gamson 1992; Gans 1979; Grossi 2007; Tuchman 1978). Thus, media coverage was more detailed when it focused on social issues (health, vaccination, education, educational technologies and virtuality, social exclusion, solidarity, young people and women) and labour issues (salaries, female employment, work–life balance, precariousness, and teleworking) than when it dealt with a political perspective on proposals or the implementation of policies to reduce the effects of the pandemic, or an economic perspective focusing on both the analysis of the economic crisis (macroeconomic data, forecasts of agencies, slowdown of the economy, impact on taxes, etc.), as well as its relationship with other political, environmental, and social aspects.

This lack of depth concerning the reporting of inequality is visible again when the main sources come from the political sphere (governments, parliamentarians or political parties) and the economic sphere (trade unions and business actors). An exception to this trend, however, was supranational political sources, which resulted in a more exhaustive news coverage, similarly to other sources that are not usually present in the news, such as NGO members, civil servants, or experts.

Moreover, in relation to the tendency to develop superficial international coverage, except in times of war (Allen and Hamilton 2010), as a result of shrinking media resources and the higher reliance on “second-hand” news (Riffe et al. 2018), the news items that focused on stories outside the Spanish or European Union contexts showed a stronger journalistic development. Thus, an analysis of international news, in addition to showing a more in-depth coverage in quantitative terms, also showed a greater use of analytical reporting (43.1% vs. 28.6% (x2 = 23.593, p = 0.000)) most usually in supplements (21.7% vs. 6.9% (x2 = 49.099, p = 0.000)), despite the slight increase in news coming from agencies (28% vs. 24.8%) and non-journalist collaborators (26.9% vs. 21.1%) (x2 = 13.666, p < 0.05). Thus, the appearance of new media locations in online media allow these social actors to improve their persuasive effects (Petrova 2008).

This example highlights how necessary it is to examine the level of depth of stories beyond the definition and contextualisation of inequality. Thus, ideology is one of the elements outside the concept itself that affects media coverage. Therefore, the media with a social-democratic ideology are configured as the preferential spaces to talk about inequality and to define it. They are also the specific media in which social actors related to the problem have a greater facility to share their discourses (Strodthoff et al. 1985).

Other elements such as authorship also condition the level of depth, with it being relevant that the news items carry a specific signature that comes from their own journalists, non-journalist collaborators, or even from the agencies that provided the news. This fact highlights how important the signature is to the quality of the news, as it improves the credibility of the news (Choi and Lim 2019).

5. Conclusions

The salience of inequality as a social problem has increased from 2007 as a consequence of the Great Recession resulting from the Global Financial Crisis. In Spain, this crisis, after twenty years of growth, led to an increase in inequality and poverty (Gethin et al. 2019). The Gini index shows a growth in inequality from 2005 (32.4), which accelerated from 2007 (34.1) to reach its peak in 2015 (36.2). Despite a decline from that year until 2019, inequality levels similar to the pre-crisis years have not yet been reached (World Bank n.d.). This increase in inequality has had two fundamental effects. Firstly, regional differences between rural and urban areas in terms of access to services have widened (Bank of Spain 2021). Secondly, there has been a stagnation or worsening of the living conditions of the middle class, who, if they leave the middle class, do not join the upper but rather the lower classes (OECD 2019), leading to a reduction in social mobility (OECD 2018).

The emergence of the coronavirus and the global effects of the pandemic triggered a renewal of media attention. However, it must be recognised that reporting on these kinds of social issues, which are not, at least for a long time, at the centre of media agendas, requires agents for change in inequality to seek specific channels that have editorial aims aligned with their own, as general audience channels tend to be substantially inaccessible. According to Strodthoff et al. (1985), serious attention will not be given to the concerns of a developing social cause by general audience channels until the basic tenets of the movement have been substantially clarified, the related issues are perceived as sufficiently salient, and a degree of legitimation has occurred in the perceptions of the gatekeepers for the general audience media organisations.

However, in the case of inequality, the shift from specialised to general channels has occurred inside the general media channels themselves. This is not applicable to all media, just to those that share a more ideological proximity to social agents of change related to inequality. Thus, media outlets that are close to social democracy are not only the media actors that report most about inequality, but also those that do so from a deeper and more holistic perspective. In these media, new social actors have managed to introduce inequality into new media spaces (blogs and special sections) that have appeared as a consequence of the hybrid media system (Chadwick 2017) and to transfer their perspectives and positions to the traditional sections of the media. Thus, the media salience of inequality is reinforced due to two news values: the agenda of news organisations, that is, stories that set or fit the news organisation’s own agenda, in this case due to ideological proximity, and follow-up, that is, stories about topics that are already news (Harcup and O’Neill 2017, p. 1482).

Moreover, the prominence of new media actors, different from the traditional political and economic sources, shapes the journalistic development of the inequality due to the power of the sources to set the issues and frame the news as well as to have an impact on the quality of the news (Berkowitz and Beach 1993; Kalogeropoulos et al. 2019; Zunino 2019). Thus, as alternative sources emerge, such as experts or sources from non-governmental organisations, a double effect is produced: (a) inequality framing is focused on social and labour issues rather than on political and economic issues and (b) the level of in-depth analysis of inequality increases. The final result is that the most common definition or issue-specific frame given by the media is the one that refers to the income inequality that affects people within a society/community in relation to a class gap whose main consequence is poverty. This definition was modified at specific points in time connected to central aspects of the pandemic and other contextual elements associated with domestic frames such as media ideology (Guo et al. 2012). As Guardino argues, this definition of inequality is extremely important because “the media can affect our policy perceptions and preferences, molding the popular political climates that facilitate government action (or inaction) on key issues” (Guardino 2019, p. 10).

Finally, it is necessary to highlight that, although the research has made it possible not only to show how the media define inequality, but also the degree of depth of the reporting on inequality, this interest in presenting an overall vision has made it difficult to delve into other more specific aspects that make it possible to see how the construction of media messages is evolving in the new hybrid media system. A clear example of this is the case of news with an international focus. These news items, developed from a more analytical reporting style than usual and with a greater participation of both alternative sources and alternative content creators, mainly related to social movements, have a higher level of depth in reporting on inequality than local or national news written by the media’s own journalists. Moreover, the role of experts as sources should be examined to determine whether “the true source of a message is hidden behind a more ‘trusted’ source” (Gandy 2016, p. 97).

Thus, research should raise journalists’ awareness in order to improve their reporting on inequality. In order to avoid framing the issue in terms of conflict and political polemics, journalists can rely on the support of non-traditional sources of information that allow a delving into the different perspectives of this social problem. In addition, politicians should be aware that, confronted with an issue that has regained visibility on the media agendas, new actors have emerged from social movements, supranational organisations, or the scientific field, on which journalists can rely to satisfy the information demand of the audiences. Therefore, the issue can be relevant to the media without traditional political actors contributing to its definition.

Finally, it is necessary to highlight that other elements, which are neither implicitly nor explicitly reflected in the journalistic stories and which can influence the coverage of inequality, could not be measured as a result of the design of the analysis. Furthermore, the quantitative nature of the research limits its capacity to deepen some of the results obtained.