If you take note of
the growing evidence that the partisan media can influence public
opinion rather than simply reflect it, then this new book by Mike
Berry (full title ‘The Media, The Public and the Great Financial
Crisis’) is a must read. At its heart is content analysis (what the
media said) and audience studies of two key periods: the Global
Financial Crisis (GFC) and Austerity.
There is a wealth of
fascinating material here, which I couldn’t possibly summarise with
any adequacy in a single post. Instead I want to focus on the two
final chapters. The first helps explains why large sections of the
public were so receptive to the 'Labour profligacy caused the crisis' myth. The second involves discussions with journalists.
I have written in
the past (and also in my own book) about why the suggestion that
Labour profligacy caused the deficit is simply untrue. The deficit
was unremarkable in 2007, and exploded because of the GFC. I have
focused on how this untruth was repeated endlessly by Coalition
politicians and the right wing press, and how it was not challenged
by the broadcast media or the Labour party.
What Chapter 6 of
Mike’s book shows is why this idea of Labour profligacy caught on
so easily. Between the early 2000s and 2010 the right wing press (in
Mike’s sample the Telegraph, Mail and Sun) began to publish more
and more stories about public sector waste. Now defenders of the
press might argue that there was more waste because of a Labour
government, but the number of stories in these papers increased over
the period by 600%. A much more plausible explanation was that these
papers were trying to undermine what the Labour government was doing,
particularly as it was popular.
In this way readers
of these papers were primed for the idea that Labour was being
profligate. As a result, something that was clearly false could be
sold as true. The idea that the media is ‘only reflecting the views of their readers’ is so obviously false in this case,
because any journalist worth their salt could look up deficit
figures, see that the recession caused the deficit to rise, and
inform their readers. In reality these papers promoted the lies, and
the non-partisan media did not bother to correct them.
I found the chapter
where prominent journalists were interviewed fascinating. Again I will
focus on austerity. One of those interviewed was Kevin Maguire,
political editor of the Mirror. He talks about how the real reasons
for the deficit were presented in the Mirror, but
“You very rarely saw full appreciation of it on TV or heard it on radio and you felt you were running uphill with heavy boots whenever you made the argument”
So why did the
broadcast media start obsessing with the need to reduce the deficit?
What is clear from Mike’s interviews with Robert Peston and Evan
Davis is that the broadcasters really believed a large deficit was a
problem of the utmost importance that needed to be tackled. The book
contains extracts from his interview with Evan which I abbreviate
here.
Evan: “Simon Wren-Lewis comes with a very strong Keynesian view, which is I think incidentally perfectly sensible …. But that’s quite different from saying that we should just blithely come and just say don’t worry about the deficit”
Interviewer: “Do you think you fairly represented all of these opinions, because he thinks you focused far too much on …
Evan: “Yes, but … people who hold a strong and rigid position on an issue find it very difficult not to see that we’re biased against them on anything, and Simon Wren-Lewis is in that …
Mike then writes
“However as the analysis in Chap. 2 demonstrated during the sample period in 2009 when the deficit became a major political issue there were no sources - outside of Labour - who were given space to put the Keynesian view in comparison to a range of sources who put the case for a faster pace of fiscal consolidation.”
A journalist
might say gotcha. So it wasn't the imagination of a 'rigid' Keynesian: the BBC really did promote austerity. You can see why I also treat BBC claims that they
told everyone that more than 90% of economists thought Brexit would
be harmful with a large pinch of salt.
If you want to
understand political developments since the GFC you have to
understand the media, and that means collecting and analysing hard
data in the way that Mike and others media studies academics do. What
Mike does so successfully in this book is show how stories in the
press were reflected in people’s attitudes and how this can have a
profound influence on the political climate and therefore what politicians do.
