How the Greek Press Constructed the Greek Economic Crisis

Since 2008, there has been a surge of interest in and research on the relationship between news media and economic reporting, particularly as it concerns financial crises. The 2008 U.S. subprime mortgage crisis, quickly followed by the economic crisis that began to unfold in Greece in 2009, spurred researchers to examine how newspapers around the world report on the complex, globalized economy. In the pursuit of understanding transnational economic processes, publics rely on news media to provide information about the meaning of economic events, especially crises. As such, newspapers are key players in constructing the narratives of crises. This study explores how the Greek economic crisis was framed in Greek newspapers, as opposed to foreign, non-Greek newspapers. The dialectical process through which knowledge about the financial crisis is constructed is examined. Previous research has identified common journalistic frames in the coverage the Greek economic crisis by national newspapers from Western Europe, the Americas, and Asia. These frames emphasize cultural and social explanations for the crisis yet do little to analyze the underlying economic and political causes. Furthermore, these researchers did not examine Greek newspaper coverage of the crisis. The impact on knowledge construction that results from the tendency of researchers and the media to emphasize the press of politically powerful nations, rather than less powerful states, like Greece, is discussed. Using critical theory and frame analysis, the study examines how two Greek newspapers, Eleftherotypia and Kathimerini, described and framed the crisis in ways both similar and different from each other, and, yet, quite different from the ways in which foreign newspapers framed the Greek economic crisis