Joel Stein, David Baines







Myth-making on the business pages: local press and glocal crisis

The role news media played in the global financial crisis has been widely examined. However, there has been little investigation into ways in which the corporate structure of the news media may have influenced the tone and framing of coverage. This paper interrogates the reporting by a local newspaper, the Journal, owned by one of Britain's largest newspaper companies, of the collapse of local bank Northern Rock which precipitated the UK's banking crisis; the misconduct of senior executives, and their punishment by industry regulator the Financial Services Authority. We show the Journal framed the bank predominantly as a victim of circumstance and the executives' actions as lapses, rather than calculated deceptions.

Keywords: Local journalism, financial journalism, business news, corporate media, political economy, CDA (critical discourse analysis)


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Note on the contributor

Joel Stein graduated with distinction in the MA Media and Journalism at Newcastle University in 2010. He has written for the Open Rights Group, as well as various music magazines. He works for a digital marketing firm in Manchester, and is heavily involved with the Insight Film Festival - a bi-annual event promoting inter-faith dialogue and community cohesion.
David Baines lectures in journalism at Newcastle University. He was a newspaper journalist for 30 years, and for most of that time worked on the Journal, Newcastle. He left the newspaper in August 2007. He has published papers on journalism education and hyper-local journalism and is a trustee of MediaWise and a member of the board of the Institute of Communication Ethics.