Front page economics
By: Gerald D. Suttles ; with Mark D. Jacobs.
Contributors: Jacobs, Mark D., 1947-
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2010
Place of publication: Chicago; London
Language: eng
Number of pages: 253
ISBN-13: 9780226781983
Subjects: Financial crises -- Press coverage; Business cycles -- Press coverage; Economics -- Public opinion; Economics -- Sociological aspects; Mass media and public opinion; Stock Market Crash, 1987 -- Press coverage; Stock Market Crash, 1929 -- Press coverage; Global Financial Crisis, 2008-2009 -- Press coverage
Description: In an age when pundits constantly decry overt political bias in the media, we have naturally become skeptical of the news. But the bluntness of such critiques masks the highly sophisticated ways in which the media frame important stories. In Front Page Economics, Gerald D. Suttles delves deep into the archives to examine coverage of two major economic crashes--in 1929 and 1987--in order to systematically break down the way newspapers normalize crises.

Poring over the articles generated by the crashes--as well as the people in them, the writers who wrote them, and the cartoons that ran alongside them--Suttles uncovers dramatic changes between the ways the first and second crashes were reported. In the intervening half-century, an entire new economic language had arisen and the practice of business journalism had been completely altered. Both of these transformations, Suttles demonstrates, allowed journalists to describe the 1987 crash in a vocabulary that was normal and familiar to readers, rendering it routine.

A subtle and probing look at how ideologies are packaged and transmitted to the casual newspaper reader, Front Page Economics brims with important insights that shed light on our own economically tumultuous times. --Book Jacket.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: The daily press and our collective conscience; title: The grounding of the economy; title: The daily news as figurative narratives; title: Personae and their purposes; title: Wordscapes and toonland; title: The annual business cycle and its promoters; title: The voice of the people; title: Congress and the courts have their say; title: Normalizing the economy: popular ideology and social regulation.