Agenda setting and the GFC

The global financial crisis of 2008–2009 emerged in September 2008 with the failure, merger, or conservatorship of several large United States-based financial firms (Torbat, 2008).
It is characterised by stock market falls and crashes, collapses of large financial institutions and stimulus packages. Now since the crisis actually originated in the United States it means that other countries were affected because of the interconnectedness of business, money borrowing, offshore labor and most importantly borrowing of money, because it was the collapse of large financial institutions.

While the context seems to agree with the fact that globalisation has led to the global financial crisis we also need to look at the term by itself.

How global is global? There is no economic down fall in already third world countries, does this mean it should be called the Western economic crisis?

Here I would like to point out that there is a strong connection between media content and the use of the term, ‘War on Terror’. There is no body of people with the job of naming events and his terms seems like an American designed way a justifying the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan, ‘War on Oil’ doesn’t quite have the same ring to it. At the same time the word ‘Terror’ rouses many more patriotic feelings than perhaps than naming the actual enemy-if in fact there is one.

If we deconstruct the term ‘global economic crisis’ in the same way, it is apparent that the same approach has been taken.
Global is a unifying word. It makes individuals aware that everyone is suffering the same as them and unifies the globe in the struggle against the economic beast. It also allows America to take no responsibility as igniting the crisis, when in realty there economic reach over the world and poor economics have led to the crisis.
By referring to the crisis as an economic one it puts the focus on the money, rather than the social implications such as loss of jobs, lack of jobs and social recession.
Overall the term is very passive and unifying, it is a form of agenda setting probably stemming originally from American media.
“The day-to-day selection and display of news by journalists focuses the public's attention and influences its perceptions. The specific ability to influence the salience of both topics and their images among the public has come to be called the agenda setting role of the news media” (McCombs and Reynolds, 2002).
Journalist have created this term, ‘global financial crisis,’ to set the agenda on how the economic downturn will be discussed.
“Because all the reporters are travelling on the same plane, eating the. same food, covering the same events, following up the same press releases and, most of all, reading one another's copy, reporters find themselves, as if by osmosis, sticking to the same script" (Sparrow, 2003).
Globalisation of media content through trans-national corporations such as News Corporation has led to this content and copy being shared and led to the construction and use of the term, ‘global financial crisis’.

Sources:

Torbat, Akbar E. (2008-10-13). "Global Financial Meltdown and the Demise of Neoliberalism". Global Research (Center for Research on Globalization). http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=10549. Retrieved on 2008-10-15. "These happened in a matter of a few weeks in September, constituting the largest financial failure in the US since the great depression."

McCombs, M. and Reynolds, A. (2002) 'News influence on our pictures of the world', in Bryant, J. and Zillmann, DoIf (ed.), 'Media Effects', 2nd edn., Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Mahwah, NJ, 1-16.


Sparrow, Jeff. 2003, Weapons of mass disaffection -The media, the Right and the 'war on terror'. Paper in Old Wounds. Overland, no.171, 6-13. viewed 2/5/09 from Informit.