STEVEN ANDREW is moved beyond words by a historical account of mining in Britain made from the words of the miners themselves
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Manufacturing ignorance
IAN SINCLAIR recommends a telling exposure of the role the Establishment media played in peddling its misleading analysis of the 2008 financial crash
CAILEAN MCBRIDE welcomes a refreshing and timely study of the way officialdom creates structures that exclude LGBT+ rights and humanity
The bard mourns the loss of comrades and troubadours, and looks for consolation with Black Country Jess
CHRIS MOSS relishes the painting and the life story of a self-taught working-class artist from Warrington
MARY CONWAY is disappointed by a star-studded adaptation of Ibsen’s play that is devoid of believable humanity
GORDON PARSONS is fascinated by a unique dream journal collected by a Jewish journalist in Nazi Berlin
Borrowed Time: Lennon’s Last Decade, Parthenope, Where Dragons Live and Thunderbolts* reviewed by MICHAL BONCZA and MARIA DUARTE
The Media, the Public and the Great Financial Crisis
by Mike Berry
(Palgrave Macmillan, £22.99)
MIKE BERRY, from the School of Journalism at Cardiff University, has written a quietly devastating academic examination of the impact of the British print and broadcast media on public knowledge and understanding of the 2008 financial crisis.
Focusing on the October 2008 bank bailouts and ensuing debates about the national deficit and austerity, Berry conducted content analysis, focus groups with the public and interviewed senior journalists producing the news.
With the public’s interest in economic and business news at unprecedented levels in 2008, he found that the media “functioned to channel the very real public anger … into largely symbolic issues,” while leaving the deep structural faults in Britain’s financial system largely unexamined, with City voices dominating core coverage of the partial bank nationalisations on the BBC Today programme.
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