ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to provide an original perspective on the role of the media in the 2008 global financial crisis by focusing on information flows between reporters and finance professionals. Financial information actively shapes the market events it ostensibly describes and, as George Soros recognized, price movements feed back reflexively into the market expectations that underpin asset values. This analysis also problematizes recent criticisms levelled at the financial media's ostensible failure to anticipate and critically investigate the recent crisis. Minsky's Financial Instability Hypothesis and the reflexive aspects of information flows and feedback loops described above can be usefully applied to the 2008 global financial crisis. Despite the shortcomings in the financial media's reporting of the 2008 crisis, it is far from self-evident that more diligent investigative journalism would have uncovered the risks before the crisis became inevitable. The evidence here broadly supports the argument that public media and institutional media/networks have different functions.
