ABSTRACT
The ongoing global economic crisis that began in 2007 has generated countless public discussions across multiple media platforms including traditional news outlets such as newspapers (both in print form and the increasingly preferred online mode for many readers), and the now seemingly ubiquitous social media. Throughout these discussions, people’s accounts of the economy and the reasons for its current stagnation and/or slump appear to differ somewhat from the explanations offered by various economists and pundits in mainstream media publications in the US such as the Washington Post or the New York Times. In particular, many of these economists writing for the media tend to draw upon the dominant explanatory frames of the past four decades that have been characterized as “neoliberal” and/or “globalization” discourses. This chapter addresses hegemonic discourses that have now become an integral part of common-sense beliefs (Gramsci 1971; Hall 2011) and the accompanying counter-hegemonic discourses challenging these beliefs. These beliefs are enacted in the ways in which these discourses have been developed, disseminated, and mediated by powerful institutional agents and stakeholders such as media pundits writing influential opinion columns for the general public, and the readers themselves in their own responses and comments attempting to make sense of the economy and its crisis.
