1st Edition

The Media and Austerity Comparative perspectives

Edited By Laura Basu, Steve Schifferes, Sophie Knowles Copyright 2018
    288 Pages
    by Routledge

    288 Pages
    by Routledge

    The Media and Austerity examines the role of the news media in communicating and critiquing economic and social austerity measures in Europe since 2010. From an array of comparative, historical and interdisciplinary vantage points, this edited collection seeks to understand how and why austerity came to be perceived as the only legitimate policy response to the financial crisis for nearly a decade after it began.

    Drawing on an international range of contributors with backgrounds in journalism, politics, history and economics, the book presents chapters exploring differing media representations of austerity from UK, US and European perspectives. It also investigates practices in financial journalism and highlights the role of social media in reporting public responses to government austerity measures. They reveal that, without a credible and coherent alternative to austerity from the political opposition, what had been an initial response to the consequences of the financial crisis, became entrenched between 2010 and 2015 in political discourse.

    The Media and Austerity is a clear and concise introduction for students of journalism, media, politics and finance to the connections between the media, politics and society in relation to the public perception of austerity after the 2008 global financial crash.

    Forward Justin Lewis Introduction Laura Basu, Steve Schifferes and Sophie Knowles Part I: The UK Experience 1. The UK News Media and Austerity: trends since the Global Financial Crisis Steve Schifferes and Sophie Knowles 2. Rewriting the crisis: the coverage over time Laura Basu 3. From the Banking Crisis to the Austerity Debate: How and why journalism provided a partial and limited account of the financial crisis Mike Berry 4. The recovery on TV news: Growth but no progression Richard Thomas 5. The Geddes Axe: the UK’s first austerity programme Richard Roberts Part II: European perspectives 6. The roots of the Euro Crisis and recipes to solve it in European news Heinz-Werner Niensted 7. Austerity policies in the European press: a uniform or a customized coverage? Ángel Arrese 8. Safeguarding the Status Quo: The press and the emergence of a new left in Greece and Spain Maria Kyriakidou and Iñaki Garcia-Blanco 9. Race and Class in German media representations of the "Greek crisis" Yiannis Mylonas Part III: Journalism Practice and the Crisis 10. Whose Economy, Whose News? Aeron Davis 11. How and why the media sidelined macroeconomic expertise on austerity Simon Wren-Lewis 12. Neoliberal discourse within mainstream financial journalism and the concurrent crisis in journalism Sophie Knowles 13. Economics as a floating signifier: paradigms of (mis)understanding and the problems of reporting economic news Lee Salter 14. Tools of the traders? The media’s susceptibility to policy paradigm blinkers Adam Cox Part IV: The Role of Social Media 15. Social Media and the Capitalist Crisis Christian Fuchs 16. Criticizing Financial Capitalism: Networked Narratives of Protest Movements Anne Kaun 17. Chapter 8: Online populist politicisation of capitalist crisis – Remediation of the eurozone crisis coverage on nationalist-populist party Facebook-pages Niko Hatakka 18. #thisisacoup: Geo-mapping the emergence of a hashtag across Europe’s twittersphere Max Hänska and Stefan Bauchowitz

    Biography

    Laura Basu is a research fellow in the department of media and communications, Goldsmiths, University of London and at the Institute for Cultural Inquiry, Utrecht University, the Netherlands. She is the author of Media Amnesia: Rewriting the Economic Crisis (2018).

    Steve Schifferes was the Marjorie Deane Professor of Financial Journalism at City, University of London from 2009 to 2017, where he directed a new MA in Financial Journalism. He is the co-editor of The Media and Financial Crises: Comparative and Historical Perspectives (2014). As a BBC economics journalist for 20 years, he covered many financial and economic crises around the world.

    Sophie Knowles is a senior lecturer and programme leader in Journalism at Middlesex University, UK. She has been a researcher at Murdoch University, Australia; City, University of London, UK; and the University of Cambridge, UK. She has written on the reporting of financial crises in financial news and has published work in journals such as Journalism Studies.