> Is the media hopelessly out of touch?
What income group do these media outlets think their readers belong to? If anything this kind of reporting might show why "bottom half of earners in America" are turning towards stuff like Breitbart etc.
What income group do these media outlets think their readers belong to? If anything this kind of reporting might show why "bottom half of earners in America" are turning towards stuff like Breitbart etc.
Matches right up with their reader demographics actually. News readership self-selects for higher income regardless of partisanship.
Most news outlets also stand to benefit significantly because it is primarily a tax cut for businesses.
Put "typical family" into the Breitbart search box.
The first match is for http://www.breitbart.com/economics/2017/09/30/mainstream-med... . In it, "Gary Cohn, the White House’s chief economic adviser and its lead advocate for the GOP tax overhaul" talked about the effect of the then-tax plan on "a typical family earning $100,000 with two children that has been a standard deducter, has used the standard deduction and continues to use the standard deduction".
(You'll notice that Cohn used $100,000 of income, which is the same income that Texas Sen. John Cornyn was quoted as tweeting.)
Other media sources misinterpreted that as saying that the typical family earns $100,000, when "the average American family makes $74,000 a year".
Breitbart's article complained about "the difficulty of persuading a skeptical mainstream media that the proposal would cut taxes for the middle class."
I found no article describing how the tax cut would benefit the typical family.