Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Interviews
- Introduction
- 1 Modern money, modern conflicts
- 2 Corporate suspicion in the kingdom of rationality
- 3 Financial press as trust agencies
- 4 Required distrust and the onus of a bonus
- 5 Managing credibility in central banks
- 6 Hierarchies of distrust from trust to bust
- 7 Overwhelmed by numbers
- 8 The time-utopia in finance
- 9 Taming the god of opportunism
- References
- Index
3 - Financial press as trust agencies
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Abbreviations
- Interviews
- Introduction
- 1 Modern money, modern conflicts
- 2 Corporate suspicion in the kingdom of rationality
- 3 Financial press as trust agencies
- 4 Required distrust and the onus of a bonus
- 5 Managing credibility in central banks
- 6 Hierarchies of distrust from trust to bust
- 7 Overwhelmed by numbers
- 8 The time-utopia in finance
- 9 Taming the god of opportunism
- References
- Index
Summary
This chapter discusses the role of the financial media. If the institution of money depends on trust, how is trust talked about beyond the world of financial insiders? Journalists are in the middle, not part of finance yet with close contact. They give a broad coverage to the public beyond people's personal financial affairs. I examine their own mediating trust relations before moving on to impersonal trust in the finance sector itself.
My argument does not turn on whether or not the press is to ‘blame’ for volatility, we will see. Rather, the concern is with the financial media's institutional trust role to provide full, fair and accurate financial information to the public, their organisational and legal capacity to fulfil this role, and journalists’ marginal position outside the chain of financial organisations.
There is a very different, equally important question about whether the public believes or trusts either the financial press or the world of banks and money funds. My surveys of UK and Australian populations show minimal confidence in banks (pp. 230–1). The extent to which financial journalists can be trustworthy agents to their varied audiences cannot be answered definitely anymore than by asking if the public trusts the press. However gaining an approximate, contextual assessment of their trust role is possible and, while I draw on scholarly media studies, my evidence is mainly from asking seasoned journalists, as with my interviews with core financial actors for later chapters.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Emotions in FinanceBooms, Busts and Uncertainty, pp. 69 - 102Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2012