Too Big Not to Fail

Résumé du livre

Through an understanding of media as an ideological state apparatus, this study argues that news frames constructed by journalists in press coverage of the 2008 financial crisis worked to reinforce the status quo. This is not to insist that media reinforced dominant ideology out of inherent bias or conspiracy, but instead to suggest that due to routine journalistic norms and the fact that news operates within previously established ideological constraints, the need for government intervention in the capitalist economic system was unquestioned in newspaper accounts. Ultimately, the state and economic elites, working in and though media, incorporated populist rhetoric to establish a national consensus that something needed to be done in order to avoid a total collapse of the capitalist system and American way of life. Consequently, this thesis argues that in the fall of 2008, in response to a hegemonic crisis, capitalism was re-naturalized as a vital form of social stability and as the natural order of things, and thus hegemony was restored.