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Friday, November 11
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CDE09
Media in/of Austerity
G. Khiabany
1
1
Goldsmiths- University of London, Media and Communications, London, United Kingdom
Eight years after the emergence of the first signs of a renewed global crisis of capitalism, there is no evidence of a wholehearted return to economic growth.
The economic stagnation has been such that the IMF had to consistently revise downwards its predictions of growth. The policies attributed to a politics
of austerity have been presented as virtually the only solution out of this crisis. Austerity refers to the specific sets of policies designed ostensibly to reduce
public debt that through a decrease in government expenditure on public services and welfare systems. Austerity programmes have, however, been heavily
criticized for facilitating the growth of corporate welfare at the expense of a safety net for the poorest, for bringing about the systematic entrenchment
of a market logic into as many areas of public life as possible and for being precisely the wrong approach to stimulate economic growth. Many leading econ‑
omists around the globe now believe that austerity is not a programme of recovery while increasing numbers of activists agree with former Greek finance
minister Yanis Varoufakis that ‘austerity is being used as a narrative to conduct class war’. The media are implicated in creating and circulating this narrative
about the current crisis in many ways. All over the world publicly funded media are facing increasing deregulation and privatisation as well as growing
political interference, declining budgets and even outright closure as in the case of the Greek broadcaster ERT. News media have also been some of the most
vociferous cheerleaders for austerity. A recent study conducted at University College Dublin, Ireland, shows that out of a total of 347 editorials and opinion
articles published since 2010, only 21% were opposed to austerity (46% explicitly supported it while 33% were neutral). There has also been a growth in
populist television programmes that have been criticised for attacking the principle of welfare and demonising the poor. Alongside the popular presentation
of austerity as making good economic sense, despite arguments to the contrary there has, perhaps unsurprisingly, been a surge in anti-austerity protests
from those groups who bear the brunt of austerity policies and want to resist a future of cuts, privatization and commercialization. Frequently such groups
have turned to social media as a means both of mobilisation of protest but also of information sharing regarding alternative economic discourses This panel
will seek to highlight the connections between austerity and the media and, in particular, how the media outlets have helped to construct contemporary
narratives of austerity.
PN 168
Media Studies Engages Austerity: A Situating Overview
G. Titley
1
1
Maynooth University, Media Studies, Co. Kildare, Ireland
This paper provides a situating overview of how Media and Communication Studies has responded to an ‘era of austerity’ which must be approached as
being simultaneously shaped by transnational forces and agencies, and enforced and contested in particular and often highly divergent national contexts.
As the papers in this panel contest, media institutions and processes have been reflexively central to the‘austerity’era, both because austerity is a discursive
project which has been subject to intensive processes of public normalization and contestation, but also because, from the closure of ERT in Greece to
the a more general delegitimation of public service media, media institutions have become central sites and symbols of the visions of society contested
under the sign of ‘austerity’. This paper analyzes a heuristic sample of media research from 2008–2015 to examine the ways in which the field has critically
approached the question of ‘austerity’’s mediation. It argues that in a first period, studies are predominantly produced as national case studies, and that
the unequal distribution of these studies maps onto the staggered and distributed implementation of austerity policies within the Eurozone. The exception
to this problematic ‘methodological nationalism’ are studies of the impact of the Eurozone crisis on the European Public Sphere, however these studies
frequently conclude by emphasising the democratic importance of public ideals, without engaging how the anti-democratic trajectories of austerity politics
impact on these normative deliberative processes. Overlapping with this first wave of studies is research on the informational conditions of austerity, em‑
phasizing a‘fact-checking’remit that focuses on the role of financial journalism in the banking crisis and the selection of expert sources for fiscal information
and political economic narratives. It argues that this focus on‘exposing’the empirical basis of austerity has given way to a discourse analysis focus on‘auster‑
ity’as an ideological and affective ‘fail forward’project, a focus that has broadened out from political journalism to wider cultural forms. In conclusion, and
as a platform for the panel, it argues that what is now emerging are studies that focus on the renewed imperative of new forms of public media and media
participation as galvanizing and mobilizing projects under conditions of democratic crisis and opportunity.
PN 169
Benefits TV and the Narratives of Austerity
M. Williamson
1
1
Brunel University London-, Social Sciences- Media and Communications., London, United Kingdom
At a time when the Conservative government in Britain is set to make £12 billion cuts in welfare payments in the name of austerity, leading politicians and
their allies in the media have demonized welfare claimants by stigmatising them as‘cheats’, and by linking them to criminals and to already demonized sec‑
tions of the population – immigrants, gypsies and single mums – further demonizing those groups. Television has been at the forefront of this endeavour
with all five terrestrial channels churning out pseudo-documentaries and docu-soaps about people on benefits. From the BBC’s ‘We All Pay Your Benefits’
to Channel Four’s notorious ‘Benefits Streets’, Britain’s broadcasters have tried to whip up anger and resentment at those depicted on ‘handouts’. These
programmes contribute to the political narratives of austerity by setting up a familiar ‘us’and ‘them’that portrays benefit claimants as excessive, profligate
and unclean. The intention is to persuade viewers to see welfare claimants as scroungers, despite the fact that almost 50% of the population in the UK
claims some form of benefit, the majority of which are in-work benefits. The £12b cuts, which will therefore affect millions of people, are to be blamed,
according to this new television genre, on those sections of the population who are ‘othered’in these TV narratives and on the benefit fraud they are linked