“Inequality” has become a rallying call of the 2020 Democratic field, with candidates rushing to outdo one another with policy proposals to address growing societal divisions around income and access. A close look at television news coverage, however, indicates the media have yet to emphasize this aspect of the 2020 race.

The timeline below shows the percentage of airtime on CNN, MSNBC and Fox News from July 2009 to present that mentioned “inequality” or “unequal.” While the terms can be used in a number of contexts, over the past decade they have been primarily used in discussions of income inequality. Indeed, more than half of their mentions across the three news channels explicitly mentioned “income” within 15 seconds of the mention of “inequality.” (Click on the chart for a larger view.)

During most of President Obama’s first term there was little attention paid to this concept, but October 2011 marked a watershed moment when the term came racing to the forefront, including as a feature of an influential Congressional Budget Office report.

A speech by Obama in December 2013 and a January 2014 Oxfam report cemented the topic in the media discourse for the next year and a half. However, as the 2016 election reached its home stretch, mentions of inequality had largely disappeared from the news by June 2016.

The topic has remained largely absent from the media during Donald Trump’s presidency. The January 2019 inauguration of a freshman class of progressive Democratic lawmakers has resulted in the topic receiving a slight bump in coverage thus far this year, though even that brief attention has been fading despite many of the 2020 presidential candidates bringing greater attention to it.

In contrast to the media’s quick pivot away, the timeline below shows U.S. web search interest in the phrase “income inequality” January 2004 to present, using Google Trends. (In this case the word “inequality” by itself is most strongly associated with searches about the mathematics sense of the term).

Here, the public’s interest in the subject largely mirrors the October 2011 and December 2013-June 2016 elevated media attention, but rather than dropping back to zero, search volume has remained about double what it was prior to fall 2011. The increased media attention over 2019 does not appear to have translated into increased search interest.

Most interestingly, search interest appears to strongly correlate with the congressional calendar, with a summer lull each June to August and peaks around the release schedules of major recurring reports by the Congressional Budget Office.

In the end, while inequality has become a defining 2020 Democratic theme, it seems the media has relatively little interest and the public is not embracing it.

RealClear Media Fellow Kalev Leetaru is a senior fellow at the George Washington University Center for Cyber & Homeland Security. His past roles include fellow in residence at Georgetown University’s Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service and member of the World Economic Forum’s Global Agenda Council on the Future of Government.