The sound of silence: On the (in)visibility of economists in the media

Lino Wehrheim

No 30, Working Papers from German Research Foundation's Priority Programme 1859 "Experience and Expectation. Historical Foundations of Economic Behaviour", Humboldt University Berlin

Abstract: One way for economists to influence economic policy and society as a whole is to shape what Robert Shiller has called "economic narratives". This, in turn, puts the media in their role as professional storytellers in a central position. In this paper, I investigate how economists have been covered by the media in a long-term perspective. Particularly, I address two questions: How has the quantitative visibility of economists in the media developed over time? And how can news stories covering economists be characterized in terms of their content? I answer these questions in two steps. First, I provide a comparison of economists' quantitative media visibility in international newspapers. Second, building on a corpus of more than 12,000 newspaper articles, I conduct a case study on the German Council of Economic Experts. Using various text mining approaches, I survey four features of newspaper coverage: topics, tonality, temporal perspective, and the role of individuals. Finally, based on extensive close reading, I briefly discuss two key turning points in the media history of economists, namely the 1980s and the late 1990s/early 2000s. The main finding is that economists have indeed become silent compared to their heyday of economic expertise in the 1960s, but that they have not been as silent as is often claimed.

Keywords: economic experts; economic narratives; media analysis; topic modelling; sentiment analysis (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: N01 P16 Z13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-his, nep-hme and nep-hpe
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:pp1859:30

DOI: 10.18452/22794

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