Breaking News: How Media Discourse Moderates the Psychological Costs of Unemployment

Abstract

"This study explores how the media discourse on unemployment influences the subjective well-being (SWB) costs of unemployment, pursuing two key research objectives. First, we investigate how various topics on unemployment depicted by the media amplify the negative impact of unemployment on SWB. Second, contesting the hypothesis of contextual habituation, we examine whether these media influences vary by the extent of regional unemployment. Using 22 waves (1999–2020) of rich German panel data and a full newspaper archive to assess salience of unemployment-related topics, we apply Latent Dirichlet Allocation and time-distributed fixed-effects models. Our findings reveal that salience of personal stories of unemployed individuals and poor labor market conditions in the media intensify the SWB decline among the unemployed. Contrary to the contextual habituation hypothesis, these negative conditional effects on SWB persist regardless of the extent of regional unemployment. Taken together, the findings emphasize that media discourse can reinforce unemployment’s psychological costs." (Author's abstract, IAB-Doku) ((en))

Cite article

Prechsl, S. & Müller, C. (2026): Breaking News: How Media Discourse Moderates the Psychological Costs of Unemployment. Version 1. (SocArXiv papers), 69 p. DOI:10.31235/osf.io/x2bnw_v1