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Title: “Neglected, Ignored, and Abandoned”? The Working Class in Popular U.S. Culture

Citation Type: Working Paper

Publication Year: 2019

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Abstract: This paper develops new text-mining methods to measure the recognition of American workers in the U.S. press and in American movies. The text-mining program searches 167,193 newspaper articles and 18,056 movie plots for over 35,000 job titles and codes them into standard U.S. Census occupational categories. These occupations are then recoded into common definitions of the working class and tracked over time. For The New York Times since 1980, recognition of working-class jobs has not declined, but it was always low. For regional American papers like the St. Louis Post Gazette, the Detroit News, or the Tampa Bay Times, working-class occupations had once enjoyed higher levels of recognition, but the rates have declined recently to levels similar to the New York Times. U.S. produced movies show a similar decline since 1930 in working-class inclusion.

Url: https://www.popcenter.umd.edu/research/working-papers/papers/pwp-mprc-2019-009/view

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Authors: Vanneman, Reeve

Series Title: Maryland Population Research Center

Publication Number: 2019-009

Institution: University of Maryland

Pages: 35

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Data Collections: IPUMS CPS

Topics: Labor Force and Occupational Structure, Other

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