Book Reviews: Book Review Policy

Journalism in Crisis: Corporate Media and Financialization. Nuria Almiron, trans, by WUUam McGrath. New York: Hampton Press, Inc., 2010. 212 pp. $45 hbk $23.95 pbk This is the most important available analysis of the crisis of journalism, exhibiting critical skills of which alarmingly few North American analysts are capable. Nuria Almiron is lecturer and researcher in communication at Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona. Her political economy approach goes well beyond the platitudes of death-by-Internet sermonizing even beyond the themes of concentration and overreach so well-rehearsed by Robert McChesney. McChesney and Nichols (2010) regret the passing of a Golden Age that preceded advertising. For Almiron, journahsm is in perpetual crisis, hapless child of bourgeois parents - freedom of the press as formulated in the Declaration of Rights of the State of Virginia (1776) and in the French Revolution's Declaration of the Rights of Man (1789), eternally abused by the "instrumentalization" of dominant classes. Journalism remains caught in the contradiction between its emancipating potential and the conditions imposed on it by financial globalization. No longer even the plaything of erratic conglomerates and moguls, it has entered a post-corporate era characterized by the supremacy of the capital (finance) over the industrial sphere (production) "inherent to the evolution of modern capitaUsm." The term "financialization" (first employed by Andre Orlean in 1999) is identified by Gerald Epstein (2005) as one of three main trends in global economics of the past thirty years, the others being neoUberaUsm and globalization, and defined as "the increasing role of financial motives, financial markets, financial actors, and financial institutions in the operation of the domestic and international economies." It is the product of the ending of fixed international Exchange rates, disorganization of raw-materials markets, privileged position of transnational corporations, budget deficits, deregulation, Uberalization, and monetary disintermediation. The result is conversion of the financial sector into one of today's principal sources of profit, but also of global instability - manifest in overinvestment and financial engineering as egregiously illustrated by "tax havens" that hold a third of the wealth of high net-worth individuals, and by other forms of money hiding, laundering and extreme speculation. These lead to overcapacity, concentration, and implosion. These basic capitalist cycles are far more enduring and predictable than the information, digital, ICT, and other "revolutions" that bedazzle those who should know so much better. Media and finance are closely interlinked, illustrated by the development in the mid-nineteenth-century of Reuters, not long after the London Stock Exchange, providing financial, business, and economic information flows that have become the bedrock of the very structure of modern capitalism. The technology of information flows is dependent on the raising of capital in financial markets, which are also insatiable consumers of communication technologies and financial news. Banks exert a fundamental influence on information corporations: they determine which and how many media wUl survive, their degree of concentration, autonomy, and diversity. These relationships bind concentration, internationalization, industrialization, and financialization, this latter passing through three main stages of absolute family control, relative farmly control, and managerial control. …