Financial journalism “captured” by elite sources

A new study suggests financial journalism has been “captured” by a small coterie of elite sources.

The study was conducted by Sophie Knowles from the University of the Arts London, Gail Phillips from Murdoch University and Johan Lidberg from Monash University.

A summary of the study on The Conversation notes:

To answer these questions, we conducted a comparative and longitudinal study of mainstream financial journalism in three countries during three periods of economic crisis. We looked at the coverage of the New York Times in the U.S., the Guardian in the UK, and the Sydney Morning Herald in Australia during: the 1990 recession, the Dot Com boom of 2000 and the global financial crisis (GFC) of 2007-8.
We analysed the number of articles that provided warning and discussion about an impending downturn in the two years before each crisis, the sources that framed the discussion and the kinds of topics and narratives that shaped the coverage pre- and post-crisis.
Our results back up concerns that financial journalism standards have been falling.
There has been a narrowing of the range of sources used to explain events, with public relations more and more predominant. There is less context and critique, and little or no warning given to the public of problems that may be looming. These tendencies worsened from case study to case study.
Of the 1990 recession data set, 60% of the coverage appeared before the recession was officially called and the discussion was broad, with a lively debate about the implications of the deregulation of the finance industry. In the two years before the bursting of the Dot Com bubble, 20% of the data set discussed various features of the boom and contemplated the possibility of a potential bust. But by the time the global financial crisis hit, only 8% of articles in the data set appeared before August 2007, at which time coverage suddenly explodes.