ABSTRACT
The shifting of blame for large government debts away from the 2008 financial crisis and its causes towards public profligacy has been called “the greatest bait and switch in modern history” (Blyth, 2013, p. 73). This chapter explores the role of the media in that bait and switch. It follows the twists and turns of the UK news coverage of the economic crisis in its different mutations over a period of eight years. It shows that, as the crisis has developed from banking meltdown to recession to public debt crises, it has been repeatedly reframed. These reframings – with information added and lost each time – have helped legitimise the same kinds of policies that helped cause the crisis in the first place, including cuts to social spending on one hand and ‘business friendly’ supply-side measures such as corporation tax cuts, privatisation, and deregulation on the other. The reframings amount to a kind of ‘media amnesia’ that has ideological effects, serving the interests of certain social groups. The chapter starts with some context to the crisis, then describes the research on which the chapter is based, before unravelling some of the ways the crisis has been framed over time and what this has meant for which crisis-responses are legitimised and which are excluded.
