Financial Journalism, News Sources and the Banking Crisis
JOU0010.1177/1464884912448915ManningJournalism 4489152012 Article Journalism 1 –17 Financial journalism, news © The Author(s) 2012 Reprints and permission: sagepub. sources and the banking crisis co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav DOI: 10.1177/1464884912448915 jou.sagepub.com Paul Manning University of Winchester, UK Abstract One of the most notable features of the recent and continuing global banking crisis has been the failure of financial journalism, together with the global news agencies, to alert us to the signs of imminent catastrophe, thus confounding over-simplistic models of journalism as an efficient system of antennae monitoring the external environment. With a handful of honourable exceptions, most financial journalists and most international news agencies simply failed to report much of the emerging evidence of the growing possibility of collapse. Various explanations have been proposed for this failure including the complexities of the evidence, the manipulative power of financial public relations, and the difficulties of undertaking investigative journalism when newsrooms cut staff. This article, drawing on a theoretical framework for analysing exchange relationships between journalists and their sources first developed in Manning (2001), argues that a more fully developed explanation needs to explore the ways in which a distribution of political and symbolic power shaped relationships between financial correspondents, news agencies and the key information flows operating within global financial systems. Keywords banking crisis, exchange relationships, financial journalism, information flows, news sources and power Introduction The cost of the collapse of the global financial system runs into trillions of dollars, perhaps over $10.8 trillion or around 20 per cent of world economic output, equivalent to £10,000 per person in the developed world, according to some estimates (Schiffres, Corresponding author: Paul Manning, School of Media and Film, Faculty of Arts, University of Winchester, Sparkford Road, West Hill, Hants SO22 5NR, UK.
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