Front Page Economics: How Popular Economic Storytelling Changed (in) America

This new book provides a subtle and probing look at how ideologies are packaged and transmitted to the casual newspaper reader. In Front Page Economics, a noted sociologist Gerald D. Suttles examines coverage of two major economic crashes—in 1929 and 1987—in order to systematically break down the way newspapers normalize crises. Poring over the articles generated by the crashes—as well as the people in them, the writers who wrote them, and the cartoons that ran alongside them—Suttles uncovers dramatic changes between the ways the first and second crashes were reported. In the intervening half-century, an entire new economic language had arisen and the practice of business journalism had been completely altered. Both of these transformations allowed journalists to describe the 1987 crash in a vocabulary that was familiar and routine to readers. Carefully researched and clearly written, the book offers an insightful analysis how popular economic storytelling was transformed in twentieth-century America.
I am quite sure that in the near future, researches will analyze how blogging and social media have changed public and political debates on today’s economic issues. Meanwhile let’s delve into Suttles’ interesting book.