Genre and Ideology in Economic Journalism

Economists traditionally write on the economy as if it has an objective existence and this affects text content and the discourse strategies that they employ. The "economy" is traditionally represented as an object of analysis by a set of discourses which constitute it as such. Brown (1993) points out that these discourses have become so much part of this particular discourse community that they have determined what can possibly be said and not said in economic terms. 'The central concepts of economics have been (and are) constructed within certain discursive conditions that provide their theoretical rationale and empirical evidence.' (Brown 1993:70) However the real economy is not knowable as a fact of existence which is independent of its discursive construction. Knowledge claims and language are inextricably linked and the meaning of a text is largely determined by the discourse community to which it belongs. The discourse strategies employed to demonstrate and prove economic models and analyses present in economic writing are replaced, in the genre of economic journalism, by argumentation and persuasion. Discourse conventions develop over time and constrain the ways in which ideas are written, eventually constituting a discourse genre. Secure foundations are not available and knowledge claims have to be justified within specific communities in relation to the goals of those communities. The genre of financial journalism uses rhetoric which is essentially pragmatic, understood in terms of participants, the writer¿s intention and the social context in which we find the discourse. This paper analyses the genre of financial journalism and shows how the discourse strategies employed by a financial weekly columnist exploit the tensions between the knowledge claims of economic commentators and the use of rhetorical strategies of persuasion and argument used by this particular genre to influence a particular audience and to reflect the writer¿s view of what it is that can be known or proposed. The paper considers how this genre or sub-genre deploys rhetorical devices to make arguments more convincing and how a text's meaning is produced in the process of reading in the context of other texts.