The spectacularisation of inequality via hybrid media in the “billionaire space race”

Even though economic inequality is steadily increasing in many countries, legacy media has not been effective in generating public debate: salience is rather low (Theine, 2019), sources are limited (Davis, 2018), and framing often legitimises inequality rather than problematising it (Smith Ochoa, 2020). McGovern et al (2020) summarise the situation as the “absence of a Tawney moment”, meaning the lack of a critical juncture where inequality crystallises as a problem demanding action. Against this context we present our case study, where in mid-2021 three billionaires competed to launch privately funded expeditions into space. At the time, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson together held over $360 billion US in wealth. Meanwhile much of the world was gripped by the coronavirus pandemic, resulting in widespread economic hardship and precarity. Debate about the so-called “billionaire space race” became in part then a focal point for broader grievances about economic inequality more generally. This paper argues that the debate around the billionaire space race models a different kind of contention around economic inequality than usually associated with legacy media, primarily reflecting the plebiscitary and reactive logic of the social media public sphere (Gerbaudo, 2022). Instead of deliberation over aggregate levels of inequality we observe contention motivated by dramatisation of the relative capabilities of the super-rich, assembling as crowds, oriented toward plebiscitary reactions, and mediated by social (alongside news) media. We argue that this spectacularisation of inequality is driven heavily by the logic of attention flows in contemporary hybrid media systems, and has significant implications for how the problem of rising inequality can be dealt with by democratic systems. To support this argument the study draws on two sets of data: firstly, 241 articles from 5 major legacy news sources (Al Jazeera, The Guardian, The New York Times, The Times, and The Wall Street Journal); and secondly, over 240 000 tweets collected via the V2 Twitter API. A sample of both datasets is coded manually in order to measure the salience of inequality as a political theme, as well as the actors contesting the issue in social and news media, which is combined with a computational approach tracking Named Entity references to the key actors across the two kinds of media. References: Davis, A. (2018). Whose economy, whose news. In L. Basu, S. Schifferes, & S. Knowles (Eds.), The Media and Austerity: Comparative Perspectives (pp. 157–169). Routledge. Gerbaudo, P. (2022). Theorizing Reactive Democracy: The Social Media Public Sphere, Online Crowds, and the Plebiscitary Logic of Online Reactions. Democratic Theory, 9(2), 120–138. https://doi.org/10.3167/dt.2022.090207 McGovern, P., Obradovic, S., & Bauer, M. W. (2020). Income inequality and the absence of a Tawney moment in the mass media. 27. Smith Ochoa, C. (2020). Trivializing inequality by narrating facts: A discourse analysis of contending storylines in Germany. Critical Policy Studies, 14(3), 319–338. https://doi.org/10.1080/19460171.2019.1623056 Theine, H. (2019). The media coverage of wealth and inheritance taxation in Germany (Issue 290). Department of Economics.