Median is just the arbitrary mid point between the two extremes, that doesn't actually mean anything useful to the average person. If you picked someone at random from the subset of the US population that reports an income (presumably the working population) and asked them what their income is, the most likely answer is the mode value, or in 2014 about $22,000. That's reality. That's why that is important.

The median income ($53,000) is literally pointless except as yet another indicator of how unbalanced the economy is. If the economy was perfectly balanced the median and mean would be the same, but they're nowhere near that. The median was $53,000, while the mean was $75,000. An incredibly large chunk of the US is making significantly less than a handful of massive earners. And that's not even factoring in all the dirty tricks that the richest use to hide their wealth like offshoring bank accounts and shifting most of their assets into capital gains.