The need for a new journalism.
| Author | Johnson, Joy |
| Position | Notebook - Viewpoint essay |
No one (save perhaps the odd Marxist savant) could have predicted the scale of the economic calamity now engulfing the world. It has left politicians from the President of the United States, to the Prime Minister of Great Britain, and all points around the globe, including Iceland, staring into the abyss.
But there does appear to have been--with some honourable exceptions--a collective media failure to give the growing economic storm top billing. When the storm finally hit then it dominated the news--on one day every newspaper, including the tabloids, headlined the financial meltdown--and the BBC's Robert Peston became omnipresent.
For months beforehand the stories were buried in the business pages. And in the run up to the Labour Party conference, we may as well have been in a parallel universe, as lobby journalists were treated to a blizzard of background private briefings, and some public displays of political madness by Members of Parliament who had mislaid their historical and critical faculties in their desire for a putsch against Gordon Brown.
The unforeseen recession
Even the Chancellor, Alistair Darling, recalled his surprise when he first realised the extent of the crisis:
I remember I picked up the FT in the supermarket, as you do, and it had the European Central Bank starting to put money into the economy. I phoned the office to ask why they were doing quite so much. It didn't surprise me that money was going in--there was concern going around--but it was the sheer scale of it ... No one knew how serious it was yet. (Aitkenhead, 2008)
It was during this September interview with his Guardian houseguest on the Hebridean island of Lewis that the Chancellor issued his warning: the economic times we are facing 'are arguably the worst they've been in sixty years, and I think it's going to be more profound and long-lasting than people thought' (1). Yet at the time of that intervention by the European Central Bank (9 August 2007), the sub-prime market toxicity had been coursing through the American economy for months and its contagion had already begun to spread to the outside world.
So when even the Chancellor of the Exchequer, albeit of only a few weeks, was surprised at the first real signal that something major was about to unfurl, it perhaps gives a clue as to why capitalism went to the brink and it seemed like a bolt from the blue. The prevailing wisdom had been that unbridled free markets were delivering ever increasing prosperity and the boom times would keep on booming. For hadn't Francis Fukuyama on the collapse of the Soviet Union decreed that Liberal Democracy and free market capitalism had triumphed and history had ended. The end of an epoch--absolutely--but the end of history? This was a supreme example of hubris and a display of superiority which, although a nonsense, became the new grand narrative.
New Labour, haunted by the ghosts of the winter of discontent and the political drama of former Chancellor Dennis Healey's appeal for assistance to the International Monetary Fund, bought the neo-liberal model. So what if the super-rich and the Masters of the Universe were rewarding themselves stratospheric bonuses, leading to American-style inequality gaps with wage-stagnation? That is a merely a function of the...
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