The German government has played a leading role in the Eurozone crisis management, largely characterised by a commitment to fiscal austerity and supply-side structural reforms. The legitimation of these measures in the European policy arenas as well as in the public domain has partly rested on an ordoliberal economic policy framing, which has presented the Eurozone crisis as one of public indebtedness and loss of competitiveness. To study the public legitimation of the crisis management, we analyse the press coverage of the crisis in eight Eurozone member states, with a total of 7,986 newspaper articles included in the sample. Focusing on 'problem definitions' and 'treatment recommendations' as two key elements of issue framing, we find that an ordoliberal framing of the crisis prevails in all the studied countries, while a competing Keynesian policy frame is mostly undermined. Significant variation between the countries emerges, however, on the question of EU federalisation and on the framing of the sovereign bailout loans. We discuss the implications of these findings for the success of the German government to maintain the austerity orthodoxy across the Eurozone and crowd out economic policy alternatives.

Instead of alternative economic ideas or institutional shifts, the post-financial crisis conjuncture has witnessed the persistence of neoliberal ideas and the strengthening of the institutions implementing them. Instructed by ideational institutionalism, this article analyzes the interplay between ideas and institutions by examining the public debate on economic policy in Finland during the euro crisis. We show how ideas formed by the dominant institutions of Finnish economic policy-making dominated the debate in the leading Finnish newspaper Helsingin Sanomat in the years 2009-2014. The media and the elites coalesced around a consensus built by the Ministry of Finance and EU institutions, which demanded austerity and structural reforms to the Finnish economy. Our findings support claims that established institutional forces prevent ideational shifts even during major crisis periods. The media takes part in this through its unwillingness to provide alternative viewpoints on consensual political issues, thus strengthening a post-democratic public sphere. the actual market-based causes of the crisis, and the economically and socially deleterious consequences of austerity, the 'dominant forms of economic regulation persist, apparently impervious to evidence, evaluation or the merits of alternatives' (Davies 2016, 121).Such inertia has defied the expectations of many political economists, among them institutionalists of different persuasions, who have emphasized that exogenous factors, such as economic crises of this magnitude, have historically been a major source of institutional change and the emergence of new policy paradigms (P. Hall 1993; Blyth 2001; Hay 2001).Crises tend to support new ideas that challenge conventional wisdoms, but such potentialities by necessity clash with established institutional settings and their ideological make-ups in specific national contexts (Schmidt 2008, 307;Baker and Underhill 2015). In the end, the success (or lack) of new ideas is dependent upon political conditions and the balance of power between divergent political and economic agents, interests and institutions.In this article, we will critically analyze how the public interplay between ideas and institutions has played out in Finland, a northern member of the EU and eurozone. It offers an interesting case since 'of all the European countries that turned austere, Finland was, apart from the UK, the only one that volunteered for it' (Blyth 2017, 7). One factor that accounts for this is that Finland's history of economic policy-making embodies, despite its reputation as a Scandinavian-style welfare state, persistent non-Keynesian features and a strong consensus-seeking orientation (Pekkarinen 1989; Pekkarinen and Heinonen 1998;Kantola and Kananen 2013). We will analyze how this tradition affected the responses of Finnish political and economic elites to the economic crisis. The article contributes to institutionalist research by examining how leading Finnish politicians and economic experts, together with the mainstream media...

Since the 2016 United States presidential election and the Brexit vote, media scholarship has lamented the state of democratic public communication. Scholars have used the concepts ‘post-truth’ and ‘fake news’ to describe the cocktail of disinformation and devaluation of facts. This article illustrates how ruptures in democratic public communication stem from the contradictions characterising liberalism and its ‘regime of truth’. Liberalism has oscillated between efforts to discipline the media market with such techniques as professional journalism and, on the other hand, the attempt to enhance the position of the market mechanism as a superior knowledge processor. The article builds on the thinking of Walter Lippmann and Friedrich Hayek, two influential liberal thinkers with differing ideas on the role of experts in society. Moreover, Karl Polanyi's concept of ‘double movement’ is used to argue that the problems regarding public communication are systemic features of liberal media logics.

Esimerkiksi pankeissa, taloudellisissa tutkimuslaitoksissa ja valtionhallinnossa työskentelevät talousasiantuntijat ovat journalistien taajaan käyttämiä lähteitä. Julkisuudessa esiintyvät asiantuntijat arvioivat tehtyjä talouspoliittisia päätöksiä ja talouspolitiikan liikkumatilaa. Analysoin tässä artikkelissa talous- ja politiikan toimittajille suunnatun kyselytutkimuksen (N=42) sekä 19 teemahaastattelun avulla, miten talouspolitiikkaa seuraavat suomalaiset toimittajat arvioivat erilaisissa instituutioissa työskentelevien talousasiantuntijoiden uskottavuutta ja miten talousasiantuntijan uskottavuus rakentuu toimittajien silmissä. Artikkeli nojaa journalismin tutkimuksesta tuttuun uskottavuuden hierarkian käsitteeseen. Uskottavuuden hierarkian huipulla ovat tärkeimmät poliittiset vallankäyttäjät ja puolueettomiksi mielletyt asiantuntijat, kun taas poliittisesti marginaalisiksi koetut toimijat samoin kuin puolueellisiksi mielletyt asiantuntijat ovat alempana hierarkiassa. Esitän artikkelissa, että paikka talouden asiantuntijoiden uskottavuuden hierarkiassa määräytyy ennen kaikkea asiantuntijan institutionaalisen taustan mukaan. Suomen Pankin ja valtiovarainministeriön sekä Elinkeinoelämän tutkimuslaitoksen ja Palkansaajien tutkimuslaitoksen kaltaisten instituutioiden asiantuntijoita pidetään erityisen uskottavina, kun taas journalistien suhtautuminen pankkien talouspoliittiseen asiantuntemukseen on epäilevämpää. Vaikka valtionhallinnossa ja tutkimuslaitoksissa työskenteleviä asiantuntijoita pidetään yleisesti uskottavampina kuin pankkien asiantuntijoita, toimittajat suhtautuvat kriittisesti ajatukseen talouden asiantuntijatiedon puolueettomuudesta ja epäpoliittisuudesta.

Artikkelissa analysoidaan suomalaisten sanomalehtien tapaa politisoida eurokriisi vuosina 2010–2012. Politisoinnilla viitataan lehtien tapoihin tuottaa vaihtoehtoisia näkemyksiä ja ratkaisumalleja kriisistä sekä tuoda julkiseen keskusteluun erilaisia toimijoita. Tutkimuksen aineisto koostuu 971 eurokriisiä käsitelleestä lehtiartikkelista, jotka kerättiin Helsingin Sanomista, Kauppalehdestä, Kalevasta ja Ilta-Sanomista. Tutkimus on osa Oxfordin yliopiston Reuters-instituutin johtamaa kansainvälistä hanketta, jossa vertaillaan kymmenen EU-maan lehtien eurokriisijulkisuutta. Analyysin perusteella lehdistö käsitteli eurokriisiä enimmäkseen talouden näkökulmasta ja politisoi sitä pääosin erilaisten talouspoliittisten tulkintojen ja ratkaisutapojen kautta. Lehdistön hallitsevat kriisitulkinnat mukailivat eurooppalaisen päätöksentekoeliitin näkemyksiä, ja vaihtoehtoiset näkökulmat olivat harvinaisia.  Vaihtoehtojen vähäisyyttä selittää pääosin se, että lehdistö suosi lähteenään varsin yksimielisesti esiintynyttä eurooppalaista päätöksentekoeliittiä.  Myös ekonomisteilla oli merkittävä rooli julkisuudessa, ja he toivat keskusteluun jonkin verran vaihtoehtoisia näkemyksiä. Sen sijaan kansallisten poliitikkojen ja erityisesti kansalaisyhteiskunnan edustajien merkitys julkisuudessa jäi vähäiseksi. Yleissanomalehdet mukailivat eniten päätöksentekoeliittiä, talous- ja iltapäivälehti toivat keskusteluun hiukan useammin vaihtoehtoisia ääniä. Käsittelemällä kriisiä yksiäänisesti suomalainen lehdistö onnistui kaikkiaan varsin heikosti eurokriisin politisoimisessa.

Adopting a critical perspective, this article examines how journalism has historically addressed austerity by analysing the austerity debates of the influential business magazine The Economist from 1947 to 2012. By analysing 131 articles with a qualitative frame analysis approach, I show how The Economist has used an enduring frame by which to position itself as the voice of reason against the irrationality of politics. It has typically framed austerity as necessary in times of economic distress, and political demands that contradict austerity have often been deemed irrational. In 2012, during the euro crisis, The Economist, however, framed German-driven austerity as obsessive and called for a pragmatic position on austerity. I argue that this frame of "reason over politics" is characteristic of modern journalism, which is committed to the post-ideological norm of objectivity.

After the financial crisis, journalism scholarship has extensively pointed out how the journalistic debate on economic policy has been dominated by a strong emphasis on austerity and a limited range of elite sources. Building on 19 semi-structured interviews with Finnish political and economic journalists, this article examines how journalists themselves evaluate the pluralism of the economic policy debate. This article shows how journalists covering economic policy are critical when evaluating the level of pluralism in economic journalism, referring to a narrow range of expert sources and a widely shared economic policy consensus. These findings testify to the ability of ‘primary definers’ to set the boundaries of ‘legitimate controversy’ in economic journalism. Also, the interviews show how ruptures in economic policy, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting vast amount of monetary and fiscal stimulus, create space for more pluralism in economic journalism.

Economic journalism is dependent on journalists working closely with expert sources to produce factual and nonpartisan news and analyses about economic policy. Thus, the experts routinely used in economic journalism wield power when defining the economic reality and the possibilities for policy-making. Building on 19 semi-structured interviews with Finnish economic and political journalists and a questionnaire survey conducted among journalists (N = 42), this article contributes to the existing literature on journalism practice and economic expertise by analysing how journalists perceive the credibility of various economic experts. The article draws from literature on the "hierarchy of credibility" concept and argues that journalists regard experts working for government authorities and research institutes as more credible than economic experts employed by, for example, private banks. The article argues that while a "hierarchy of credibility" exists among economic expert groups, it is difficult to make clear-cut demarcations between objective expertise and advocacy in economic journalism. Such results highlight the need for nuanced analyses on the role of economic expertise in journalism practice and in public life.