The topic of taxation, while central to redistributing wealth in increasingly unequal societies, is not one appreciated by the public. Despite general support for redistributive taxation, public preferences towards specific redistributive taxes is often ambiguous and the political representation of egalitarian positions largely absent from national politics. In this thesis, I address the question of why public perceptions of the issue are ambivalent and elites reluctant to actively engage in it. I do this by questioning the basis of public understandings of wealth-based taxes that lie at the heart of public evaluations and preferences. So far, authors mostly concentrated on individual tax illiteracy and notions of deservingness to explain fuzzy tax preferences. In contrast, I will focus on the role of the media, the prime conveyor of information and knowledge in Western democracies, as the bedrock of culturally embedded and socially shared knowledge on taxation. These cultural understandings of taxation, in turn, influence public judgements and perceptions on tax policies. Using a text mining approach based on structural topic modelling, I map and analyse the German news media debates on wealth and inheritance taxation spanning the last two decades. The results show a general dominance of stable, long-term anti-tax frames both in quantitative terms as well as in their discursive properties—their coherence, stringency and persuasive power. Meanwhile, pro-tax frames are mostly relegated to periodic but moderate salience, remain abstract in their messaging and often technical in their argumentation. The notion of a culturally embedded framing repertoire is substantiated by the results, which find a stable prevalence of a relatively limited number of core frames. Further hypotheses of structural influences on tax reporting, meanwhile, are only partially confirmed. Findings on the journalistic routine of event-based reporting show a moderate but differentiated impact of issue-relevant events on framing prevalences. While anti-tax frames demonstrate a relatively high flexibility to such events, pro-tax frames are remarkably insensitive to all but the greatest of crisis events. The results further confirm a consistent ideological bias in news reporting that conforms to news outlets' general editorial policy. Other organisational pressures such as the type of outlet, its distribution frequency or range returned inconclusive results. This reinforces the notion that the debates on wealth-based taxation are ideologically structured as well as constrained and informed by a culturally anchored repertoire of frames.