ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the media’s role in the introduction of the Dodd-Frank Act in the United States, a law aimed at regulating the excesses of the financial sector after the global financial crisis. It considers the interplay between politics and lobbying, and the sources that journalists rely on to cover an important subject that historically has garnered little attention from the public. In a broader sense, it investigates how the media may have played a role in the United States in helping the prevailing market-oriented policy paradigm survive the 2008 global financial crisis. The chapter suggests that attempts to forge a new paradigm, one predicated on the need for government regulation, were short-lived, and that the media remained receptive to arguments for deregulated markets despite the most cataclysmic crisis since the 1930s. This notion of paradigm survival is vital in understanding media behaviour; it may have implications for agenda-building theory in the low-salience world of financial policy.
