Tax talk in the Rich Lists: from celebrating to scrutinizing the super-rich

Abstract This article analyses journalism related to the Rich Lists produced by the Sunday Times and Forbes from 1995 to 2022, considering the quantity, content, and discursive framing of the coverage of taxation of the super-rich. It finds that coverage of wealth taxation and tax avoidance by the super-rich was profoundly altered after the global financial crisis. Substantively, the article contributes to a better understanding of secular trends in ideational change about taxation. Its media focus puts a spotlight on popular rather than expert ideas about taxing the super-rich, over a period ranging from neoliberalism’s heyday to well after the global financial crisis. Methodologically, it combines computer-assisted analysis borrowed from corpus linguistics with qualitative methods. This enables analysis of a large corpus over a long period, while also being attentive to subtler points of language such as argumentation, vocabulary, metaphors, and rhetorical flourishes.