Emma Ischinsky Completes Doctorate on Media Representation of the Super-Rich

Mid-July saw Emma Ischinsky defend her dissertation titled “(Un)Covering the Rich: Invisibility, Deservingness, and Legitimation in Mediated Representations of Germany’s Wealth Elite” at the University of Cologne. Her cumulative dissertation examines German media reporting to consider how extreme wealth concentration can persist despite the tensions that exist between it and democratic norms and ideals of fairness and merit. Ischinsky explores in her study the processes behind public visibility, interpretation, and legitimation of wealth. Drawing on the sociology of ignorance, deservingness theory, and the political economy of the media, she examines three dimensions of media representation: visibility, moral evaluation, and institutional variation. Empirically, the study works with two large datasets: a database of 1,718 of the wealthiest individuals in Germany from manager magazin rich lists (2001–2023) and a corpus of 143,774 newspaper and magazine articles mentioning these individuals from eight major German media outlets. Using quantitative text analysis, Ischinsky identifies two mechanisms that stabilize extreme wealth in public discourse: selective invisibility and narrative legitimation. A large proportion of the wealth elite remain all but invisible, and those who receive media attention often appear in narratives around entrepreneurship, contributing to society, or humility. At the same time, representations vary systematically between different media, depending on ownership structure and audience. Through these insights the study shows how media representations feed into the reproduction of wealth inequality. Emma Ischinsky’s supervisor at the MPIfG was Jens Beckert.