Financialisation, media and social change

This article uses a circuit of communication framework to examine the role of the media in shaping public debate on the financial system and the way in which this impacts on audience response and related societal impacts. It is founded in debates about neo-liberalism and financialisation which highlight the shift of power from, or through, the state to large corporations. One result of this structural shift is an increasingly integrated political, media and corporate culture which promotes the interests of the ‘market’ in public and private lives, and operates to limit the information available to audiences. Alternatives to economic policies and solutions to problems are marginalised in public debate, as illustrated by media coverage of the financial crisis. This limiting of alternatives is decisively implicated in the development of sympathetic attitudes to ‘preferred’ perspectives and related policy moves, which constrain the potential for effective resistance at the level of collective and individual responses.