Abstract
The Media and Austerity: Comparative Perspectives edited by Laura Basu, Steve Schifferes, and Sophie Knowles is a long-awaited contribution by media scholars investigating the financial crisis. The book takes the perspective that 2008 represented “one of the defining moments of the 21st century,” as Justin Lewis states in the foreword to the book. Main debate throughout this publication concentrates around austerity presented by politicians and the media as the only solution to economic crisis. In the absence of alternatives, this one-sided perspective is also evaluated as a failure of journalism. The book is structured along four key axes: the U.K. experience, continental perspectives, journalistic practice, and social media, social movements, and the crisis. Furthermore, it benefits from the variety of perceptions and experiences as its contributors are experts in fields of communication and media research (C. Fuchs, A. Kaun, Y. Mylonas), media management (H.W. Niensted), journalism (M. Berry, A. Cox, I. Garcia-Blanco, M. Kyriakidou, J. Lewis, R. Thomas), economics (A. Arrese, S. Wren-Lewis), politics and political economy (A. Davis, N. Hatakka), digital technologies (M. Hänska), sociology of media (M. F. Murru), development studies (S. Bauchowitz), and history (R. Roberts).
The leading argument of the book starts with historical facts as background, is developed through case studies, and moves to theoretical discourse. The main argument is supported by media content analysis of leading newspapers presented in chapters on “Covering the Euro Crisis: Cleavages and Convergences” and “Austerity Policies in the European Press: A Divided Europe?” Next to the well-known Marxist theory, used to explain the mechanism of capitalist crisis, the theory of media amnesia and the crisis proposed by Laura Basu is a quite new contribution to the subject and helpful in opening new directions to the research. Sophie Knowles also offers a refreshing view of the area, explaining through views of financial journalists she interviewed the crisis of (neoliberal) journalism and its consequences for the coverage of economic crisis.
As we know from scholarship about media content, national context still plays a crucial role. Therefore, analyses from different countries strengthen the book and the argument. Given the fact that the economic crisis in Europe hit the Southern part of the continent the most, investigations on Greece and Spain come up a bit short. Overall, the book attempts to be an international comparison and from the way it is presented, a reader might expect more variety and more countries; however, the discussion is very much U.K.-focused. Chapter 7 by Ángel Arrese elaborates profoundly on more than 13,000 news stories from 10 EU countries, giving space for Belgium, Italy, the Netherlands, and Poland, rarely analyzed in context of economic crisis.
The final section on social media, although very relevant as the articles belong to the marginalized group of antiausterity publications, is overshadowed by the other three parts of the book. Part IV gives the impression of being a supplement that was not integrated into the previous argumentation. An effort to integrate them would have given more prominent space to other countries such as Sweden and Latvia (chapter by Kaun and Murru) and Finland, as balance to the U.K. perspective. It is questionable whether this needed to be an extra part of the book, or the chapters would have been better supported had particular arguments been integrated into the previous three parts, as they all resonate with previous contributions. For instance, “Facebook and the populist right: how populist politicians use social media to reimagine the news in Finland and the UK” would have been a perfect bridge between the Part I and Part II as it is situated in both contexts. “Narrative mediation of the Occupy movement: a case study of Stockholm and Latvia” harmonizes with other contributions presenting the continental perspective, while Christian Fuchs explains how capitalism accelerated the rise of social media and made them main channels of ideology nowadays. As literature has shown, the crisis of traditional journalism goes hand in hand with popularization of social media or “Twitter revolutions.”
This book is a significant voice that contributes to public understanding of the mechanism of the economic crisis and political decisions made to combat its consequences. Furthermore, it shows the interplay between the media and the governmental narratives demonstrated in lack of critical questioning and intellectual debate about possible alternatives. The Media and Austerity can serve as valuable source in academic courses that seek to explore factors and causes for such turning points as the global financial crisis and how it frames public discourse. Moreover, the publication might inspire media professionals to reconsider their techniques of covering economic policies in the context of political decisions. Journalists as intellectual leaders have a significant role to play here. In case of economic crisis, media supported the politics and pleas for short-term repayment of debts as outcome of draconic austerity measures. The lesson coming from the discussion is the need for debate on long-term strategy against economic struggles beyond political interest. Media as the fourth power in democracy could and should initiate this discussion.