16% of six-figure earners is the really shocking part here. They make 100k and don’t have a 401k or IRA? What?! How?!

All taxpayers are exposed to the stock market via taxpayer funded defined benefit pension plans and retiree healthcare plans. Stock market goes down, taxes go up (and/or quantity/quality of government services goes down).

Of course, that can happen anyway due to a relatively rapid decrease in the purchasing power of the currency.

Eh, the news dealing with issues that affect 60% of people seems pretty reasonable to me?

I also don't really think it's particularly helpful to categorise people in this way - if we were talking about an immutable characteristic, like if the news spent half of the time talking about the struggles of being 7ft tall even though basically no-one is 7ft tall, that would be a bit odd.

But buying shares is a generally available thing.