Front Page Economics

In an age when pundits constantly decry overt political bias in the media, we have naturally become skeptical of the news. But the bluntness of such critiques masks the highly sophisticated ways in which the media frame important stories. In "Front Page Economics," Gerald Suttles delves deep into the archives to examine coverage of two major economic crashesOCoin 1929 and 1987OCoin order to systematically break down the way newspapers normalize crises. Poring over the articles generated by the crashesOCoas well as the people in them, the writers who wrote them, and the cartoons that ran alongside themOCoSuttles 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, Suttles demonstrates, allowed journalists to describe the 1987 crash in a vocabulary that was normal and familiar to readers, rendering it routine. A subtle and probing look at how ideologies are packaged and transmitted to the casual newspaper reader, "Front Page Economics" brims with important insights that shed light on our own economically tumultuous times.