There is a growing symbiotic relationship between business, communication networks and
the mass media. Business depends on communication networks and the mass media in
numerous ways; in the actual conduct of business, in the need for market information, for
advertising and market creation, and as ideological apparatuses which acts to naturalise
market economies and defend business interests. Such trends have been exacerbated in the
media industry in recent decades as media has been increasingly consolidated into massive
transnational corporations with interests far wider than journalism. In fact it is argued that the
contemporary mass media, rather than simply reporting on economic issues, have become an
integral part of economic processes.
A clear example of this process, and the growing links between business and journalism, is
the coverage of housing and the property market in Ireland. The Irish property market
suffered one of the greatest crashes in modern history, directly costing the state tens of
billions in bank bailouts and hundreds of thousands of mainly working class livelihoods. A
key discursive element of housing and property news has been the framing of housing as a
commodity rather than a social need, as well as a privileging of market needs over society
ones. This was the case in much of the coverage of the housing market by the Irish media in
the run up to the housing crash of 2007/2008. This framing, as well as ignoring key social
problems such as affordability, included an insidious and dogmatic belief in the primacy of
the market that blinded much of the Irish media to the possibility of the crash, thus acting
both to encourage and elongate the bubble. There is little evidence that this framing of
housing as a commodity rather than a social need has changed as most discourse continues to
be around ‘fixing the market’ rather than thinking outside of it.