July 15, 2010
The media, and especially business journalism, played a profound role in representing the global financial crisis, and therefore, in setting the parameters of meaningful debate about them. Business journalism primarily uses the frame of instantaneous economic growth, the “miracle of the market” and its self organizing character and negative power of the state and the democratic public.
In their Neoliberal Newspeak and Digital Capitalism in Crisis in the International Journal of Communication (4 2010) Paula Chakravartty and Dan Schiller situate the global financial crisis:
in relationship to the transformed domestic and transnational field of business and financial news, encompassing traditional and new media and across the blurred boundaries of infotainment. After briefly reprising the transition to a neoliberal digital capitalism and the crisis to which it has led, we show that economic journalism has been no mere reflection but a constitutive element of the crisis. Our objective here is to provide a political economic overview of the evolution of the dominant business and financial news field primarily in the U.S. and provisionally in terms of linked transnational transformations.
The concept of digital capitalism is distinct from other theories that emphasize the central role of information within contemporary society. The theory of digital capitalism borrows suggests that information has been a leading component of the spatial- temporal fix with which capital attempted to extricate itself from the last major episode of crisis.
Chakravartty and Schiller say that the global financial crisis the financial sector, which demanded light regulation now demands the socialization of losses, thereby undermining the legitimacy of neoliberal doctrine. Did this happen in journalism? How did journalists address this and other questions:
What are the causes and likely outcomes of the crisis? What are its social and human costs? How might our political economic arrangements be additionally altered to mitigate the crisis and to ensure that the rescue effort itself adheres to principles of democratic accountability?
Unfortunately they don't really address these questions:
We began this article discussing the moment that many within the business news field identified as a turning point in the history of neoliberalism in the United States and, by extension, in the world. Upon reflection, it seems that it is certainly too early to tell what, if anything, has changed in terms of the continued dominance of neoliberal newspeak. We have tried to make sense of the meaning of this drama and have argued that we must do more than accord scrutiny to media representations of a process that is supposedly occurring someplace else.
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