Financial Innovation and Institutional Voices in the Canadian Press: A Look at the Roaring 2000s

This corpus-assisted analysis examines seven Canadian newspapers from 2001 to 2008 in English and in French. It focuses on the speech that journalists reported when covering new financial instruments, namely collateralized debt obligations, credit default swaps, and asset-backed commercial paper. Eight years of news were surveyed with a concordancer and the data were analyzed using critical discourse analysis. The data show a wider range of voices in the English subcorpus when compared with the French. In both subcorpora, however, journalistic attitude was neutral and critical voices were deselected, while institutional voices such as those of banks were foregrounded. If polyphony is understood as the inclusion of an array of voices from the community, our study shows that the press was monophonic. Concurrently, our investigation of the Canadian press reveals that financial innovations were not covered until 2007, when credit derivatives started to falter.