MEDIA LENS: Correcting for the distorted vision of the corporate media
February 5, 2008
Watching the corporate media report the ‘financial crisis’ is instructive. From the perspective of power, it is important that a steadying hand is applied to the tiller of news and commentary on the crisis, and the global economy itself.
And so columnist Martin Wolf took a ‘measured’ view in the Financial Times. There have been 100 “significant” banking crises in the past thirty years, he noted, making them almost routine. Authorities have had to intervene to “rescue” the US financial system from four crises over that period: the developing country debt and also the “savings and loan” crises of the 1980s; the commercial property crisis of the early 1990s; and now the subprime and credit crisis of 2007-08. As Wolf observed correctly of the banking sector: “No industry has a comparable talent for privatising gains and socialising losses.”
David Blunkett? No, this was John Stonehouse, Labour member of parliament on 17 February of the same year as Powell’s infamous ‘rivers of blood’ speech and quoted by Powell in his own speech.
The New Dark Age 