Abstract
The primary purpose of this book is to analyse the exposure and credence given by the British news media to different interpretations of the economic environment in the decade before the 2008 Financial Crisis. By employing two complementary research methods, it assesses the coverage given to disparate political narratives in three different contexts by four different news organisations over a ten-year period. This chapter covers the research design. First, it explains the choice of case studies (economic globalisation, private finance in British public services, and Tesco) and the news media (the BBC, the Times-Sunday Times, the Daily/Sunday Telegraph and the Guardian-Observer). The bulk of the chapter is devoted to three contextualising sections, one for each of the case studies, which outline the competing arguments and narratives evident in mediated debates. The final section describes the methodology and explains how the political content of news was assessed through a combination of quantitative content analysis and critical discourse analysis.
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Notes
- 1.
Public–private partnership (PPP ) can be defined as: ‘any collaboration between public bodies, such as local authorities or central government, and private companies’, and hence, PFI is one type of PPP (BBC 2003b).
- 2.
For example, Kelvin Hopkins MP called the PFI ‘irrational nonsense’ and ‘less popular than the poll tax’ (BBC 2002e).
- 3.
- 4.
This was evident in the subtitle of Robert Greenwald’s 2005 film Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Prices (Bradshaw 2006).
- 5.
Milton Friedman said corporate executives have just one: ‘social responsibility… to make as much money as possible for their shareholders ’. According to Harvard Business School Professor Debora Spar, corporations are: ‘…not set up to be moral entities… they really only have one mission, and that’s to increase shareholder value ’ (Bakan 2004: 34–35).
- 6.
The net impact on employment of 93 new store openings was 25,685 job losses, or 276 per store (Porter and Raistrick 1998).
- 7.
Less than one per cent of Tesco’s product lines were Fairtrade accredited (FoE 2005: 6).
- 8.
These—and other—studies feature in Chapter 1.
- 9.
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Merrill, G.J. (2019). Research Design. In: The Political Content of British Economic, Business and Financial Journalism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-04012-3_2
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