This book explores the impact of the print and broadcast media on public knowledge and understanding of the 2008 Great Financial Crisis. It represents the first systemic attempt to analyse how mass media influenced public opinion and political events during this key period in Britain's economic history. To do this, the book combines analysis of media content, focus groups with members of the public and interviews with leading news journalists and editors in order to unpack the production, content and reception of economic news. From the banking crisis to the debate over Britain's public deficit, this book explores the key role of the press and broadcasting in shaping public understanding and legitimating austerity through both short and long term patterns of media socialisation.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter details “how the U.S. business press could miss the most important economic implosion of the past eighty years” (Eric Alterman, media columnist for The Nation). In this sweeping, incisive post-mortem, Dean Starkman exposes the critical shortcomings that softened coverage in the business press during the mortgage era and the years leading up to the financial collapse of 2008. He examines the deep cultural and structural shifts—some unavoidable, some self-inflicted—that eroded journalism’s appetite for its role as watchdog. The result was a deafening silence about systemic corruption in the financial industry. Tragically, this silence grew only more profound as the mortgage madness reached its terrible apogee from 2004 through 2006. Starkman frames his analysis in a broad argument about journalism itself, dividing the profession into two competing approaches—access reporting and accountability reporting—which rely on entirely different sources and produce radically different representations of reality. As Starkman explains, access journalism came to dominate business reporting in the 1990s, a process he calls “CNBCization,” and rather than examining risky, even corrupt, corporate behavior, mainstream reporters focused on profiling executives and informing investors. Starkman concludes with a critique of the digital-news ideology and corporate influence, which threaten to further undermine investigative reporting, and he shows how financial coverage, and journalism as a whole, can reclaim its bite. “Can stand as a potentially enduring case study of what went wrong and why.”—Alec Klein, national bestselling author of Aftermath “With detailed statistics, Starkman provides keen analysis of how the media failed in its mission at a crucial time for the U.S. economy.”—Booklist

Examines the causes of the financial crisis that began in 2008 and reveals the weaknesses found in financial regulation, excessive borrowing, and breaches in accountability.

The Media and Financial Crises provides unique insights into the debate on the role of the media in the global financial crisis. Coverage is inter-disciplinary, with contributions from media studies, political economy and journalists themselves. It features a wide range of countries, including the USA, UK, Ireland, Greece, Spain and Australia, and a completely new history of financial crises in the British press over 150 years. Editors Steve Schifferes and Richard Roberts have assembled an expert set of contributors, including Joseph E Stiglitz and Lionel Barber, editor of the Financial Times. The role of the media has been central in shaping our response to the financial crisis. Examining its performance in comparative and historical perspectives is crucial to ensuring that the media does a better job next time. The book has five distinct parts: The Banking Crisis and the Media The Euro-Crisis and the Media Challenges for the Media The Lessons of History Media Messengers Under Interrogation The Media and Financial Crises offers broad and coherent coverage, making it ideal for both students and scholars of financial journalism, journalism studies, media studies, and media and economic history.

Written by one of the foremost experts on the business cycle, this is a compelling and engaging explanation of how and why the economic downturn of 2007 became the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009. Author Howard Sherman explores the root causes of the cycle of boom and bust of the economy, focusing on the 2008 financial crisis and the Great Recession of 2008-2009. He makes a powerful argument that recessions and the resulting painful involuntary unemployment are inherent in capitalism itself. Sherman clearly illustrates the mechanisms of business cycles, and he provides a thoughtful alternative that would rein in their destructive effects.

This book analyzes how the Global Financial Crisis is portrayed in contemporary popular culture, using examples from film, literature and photography. In particular, the book explores why particular urban spaces, infrastructures and aesthetics – such as skyline shots in the opening credits of financial crisis films – recur in contemporary crisis narratives. Why are cities and finance connected in the cultural imaginary? Which ideologies do urban crisis imaginaries communicate? How do these imaginaries relate to the notion of crisis? To consider these questions, the book reads crisis narratives through the lens of myth. It combines perspectives from cultural, media and communication studies, anthropology, philosophy, geography and political economy to argue that the concept of myth can offer new and nuanced insights into the structure and politics of popular financial crisis imaginaries. In so doing, the book also asks if, how and under what conditions urban crisis imaginaries open up or foreclose systematic and political understandings of the Global Financial Crisis as a symptom of the broader process of financialization.