The necessity of economic growth is a conventional wisdom of our time, assumed to lead to more prosperity and be a panacea for any societal problem. However, infinite economic growth is hard to reconcile with a finite planet, and there is a growing body of evidence that suggests that growth is no panacea nor inherently linked to prosperity. With the starting point that news media is of ideological importance, this study investigates how the hegemony of growth (as it has been called by Schmelzer [2016]) is perpetuated in news. Through a narrative analysis of articles from 2017, from Dagens Nyheter (DN) and Times of India (TOI) it analyses how news describes benefits of GDP growth, constructs stakeholders in relation to it, and discusses the ideological implications of these portrayals. The results show that the basic narratives are similar in both newspapers and primarily describe economic growth as desirable, without any references to contested status of the ability of growth to lead to prosperity – perpetuating the hegemony of growth. Many position the state as responsible for generating growth, others describe corporate growth as something good in and of itself, and the narratives create a ‘we’ in relation to ‘the economy’. These are narratives with implications for how societies negotiate between economic growth and competing goals, e.g. keeping within the planetary boundaries. Further, as growth cannot be assumed to automatically lead to ‘better’, this has implications for how journalistic autonomy should be perceived in relation to economic reporting.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:su-157035 |
| Date | January 2018 |
| Creators | Hallin, Hanna |
| Publisher | Stockholms universitet, JMK |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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