Book Chapter Details
Mandatory Fields
Henry Silke
2017 May
The Death of Public Knowledge?
The Press, Market Ideologies and the Irish Housing Crash,
Goldsmiths/MIT
London
In Press
1
Optional Fields
Ireland Journalism Irish Crash Housing Housing Bubble

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. 

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