ABSTRACT
This chapter does two things: first, it offers a critical theoretical conceptualisation to explain the crisis in the political economic reporting of financial crisis, with special reference to the 1929 and 2008 financial meltdowns. The second part of this chapter offers a critical empirical exploration of the links between issues of personal finance and consumer fraud by undertaking a critical comparison between the business press reporting of the subprime loans in the mortgage market in the UK, which partly contributed to the 2008 financial crisis, and the horsemeat scandal in the UK in 2013. Moreover, the mainstream financial journalism framing of this will invoke framing elements such as appeals for deregulation or, where necessary, cautious regulation and credit crunch to paint a situation of an uneasy calm rather than total economic collapse so as to help restore investor confidence, drawing mostly from analysis and interpretations from elite corporate sources representing the interests of big investors.
