Abstract
This chapter examines how the British national press and public service broadcasting reported on the 2008 Banking Crisis and its aftermath. Key questions addressed in the chapter include: Who did the media cite as responsible for the crisis and how was it explained? How were the bank rescue plans evaluated and critiqued? Who were the key sources in news coverage? What was the range of debate on the nationalising the failed banks? What reforms to the finance sector were discussed? The results indicated that although there were some important differences between press and broadcast reporting there were significant areas of overlap. In particular, both press and broadcasting presented the view there were no alternatives to the bank bailouts and featured few voices calling for far-reaching systemic reforms to the sector. Instead much of the coverage was fixated on the relatively peripheral issue of restricting banker’s bonuses.
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Notes
- 1.
‘Zombie’ banks are institutions which are weighed down by bad debts and therefore unable to provide credit to the wider economy. This sharp curtailment in the credit available to businesses and households can lead, as in the Japanese case, to a period of prolonged recession or stagnation.
- 2.
Out of the seven months of coverage there were six days of coverage which could not be coded because the audio files were not available either from the BBC website or Box of Broadcasts. These were 1 January, 20 January, 26 February, 18 March, 7 May and 15 May.
- 3.
See also Christensen et al. (2016).
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Berry, M. (2019). The Banking Crisis: Content Studies. In: The Media, the Public and the Great Financial Crisis. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-49973-8_2
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