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Neoliberal newspeak & digital capitalism

12th July 2010, 01:13 pm by Stan

Changes in the practice of business journalism are a key element in the current financial crisis. The increasing emphasis on features and infotainment at the expense of hard
news has distracted public attention from the reality of global economies. In this article, we provide an overview of the dominant business and financial news media, primarily in the United States, but also in the urbanizing nations of China and India. We believe that it is too early to know what, if anything, has changed in terms of the dominance of neoliberal newspeak and we contend that rigorous scrutiny of business media is vital to global economic health.

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6 Comments

  1. Kim Sky:

    “Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” Good Read by a great journalist/activist “Stieg Larson”

    Speaking of an imaginary book titled,” The Knights Templar: A Cautionary Tale for Financial Reporters”

    About this imaginary book, quotes:

    The first chapter was a sort of declaration of war in which Blomkvist did not mince words. In the last twenty years, Swedish financial journalists had developed into a group of incompetent lackeys who were puffed up with self-importance and who had no record of thinking critically …

    He compared the efforts of financial journalists with the way crime reporters or foreign correspondents worked…

    … the normal journalistic mandate to undertake critical investigations and objectively report findings to the readers appears not to apply. Instead the most successful rogue is applauded. In this way the future of Sweden is also being created, and all remaining trust in journalists as a corps of professionals is being compromised.

    12 July 2010, 2:02 pm

  2. Stan:

    Among the most pernicious innovations were financial products targeting customers who were most likely to go into debt, including people with no income and no jobs, with high-cost sub-prime mortgages. Robert Wade has drawn parallels between this kind of domestic predatory lending and the petrodollar-charged lending in the 1970s to Third World national governments that triggered the African and Latin American debt crises of the 1980s. In the present crisis, Wade argues, “economically marginal people within the U.S., constituted in effect a ‘developing country’ within the United States” (Wade, 2008, p. 31).

    Lots of content in this thing.

    12 July 2010, 2:51 pm

  3. Henry:

    Stan: a live link is missing to the above article. Here it is:

    Neoliberal newspeak and Digital Capitalism in Crisis

    http://ijoc.org/ojs/index.php/ijoc/article/viewFile/798/441

    See also the latest article by Bill Mitchell:

    We have been here before …

    The daily rhetoric being used to promote fiscal austerity maybe couched in the urgency of the day but we have heard it all before. In this blog I just reflect on history a little to remind the reader that previous attempts to carve public net spending, based on the “expectations” belief government was not going to tax everybody out of existence, failed to deliver. The expected spontaneous upsurge in private activity has never happened in the way the mainstream macroeconomic supply-siders predicted. Further, the chief proponents usually let it out in some way that the chief motivation for their vehement pursuit of budget cuts was to advance their ideological agendas. Of-course, the arguments used to justify the cuts were never presented as political or class-based. The public is easily duped. They have been in the past and they are being conned again now. My role is to keep providing the material and the arguments for the demand-side activists to take into the public debate.

    http://bilbo.economicoutlook.net/blog/?p=10660#more-10660

    12 July 2010, 2:54 pm

  4. Bruce F:

    Is there a link where we can read the rest of the original story? I did a basic search and came up with a pdf via google docs, a format that I have a hard time viewing.

    Thanks.

    12 July 2010, 3:39 pm

  5. Stan:

    Thanks for the heads-up, James. Typos in the html.

    12 July 2010, 5:50 pm

  6. Stan:

    Link works for me. Hmmmm. Thanks Henry. I think this one’s fixed.

    -Technophule

    13 July 2010, 6:33 am

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