Business Elite Competition or a Common Concern?

Abstract

This article examines how mainstream news journalism reported a recent industrial crisis in Sweden (2011) and compares it with the journalistic construction of a similar crisis in the late 1970s. Analysis shows that the one-dimensional news coverage today fails to contextualize the crisis, preferring instead to report the surface drama and exalt the competitiveness of the economic elite. In this oversimplified understanding and construction of a crisis, journalism neglects certain aspects and focuses on matters relating solely to the market. The political and labor perspective highlighted in the crisis coverage of the 1970s is missing in more recent reports. The different voices discussing the causes, characteristics, consequences and solutions of crisis in the industry four decades ago have been replaced by several economic or market experts representing broadly the same perspective; a narrow business understanding of what is at stake, how a crisis can be solved as well as by whom. The class aspect, along with the democratic implications when the interests of the working class and the view of industry as an arena for labor are largely neglected by mainstream news journalism, are highlighted in the study.

KEYWORDS:

• crisis
• ideology
• journalistic representations
• neoliberalism