Wall Street Bailout Has Been Essay

There is very little direct connection presented with regards to the electorate, and what is presented is in a brief, fear-oriented snippet: "factories would shut down, people would lose their jobs."

By framing the article from the perspective of regulators, the article portrays the Wall Street bailout as economic necessity. The public is being asked to sympathize with the regulators, who are portrayed as working hard to stabilize a difficult situation. The article does not carry a strong political perspective in its subtext. What it does carry, however, is a view favorable to Wall Street, the Journal's target audience. The Journal is, however, an influential paper likely to hold sway with voters, who want to see Congress and the regulators managing the stability of the economy effectively. At the time, the chaos of the recession was not portrayed as a given, indicating that such action as taken by the regulators would likely salvage the economy.

This article is not a column or blog, so the tone is more even-handed than the Krugman piece, but the choice of people to quote, and the way that the argument was framed, clearly lend sympathy to the role of the regulators. They are portrayed as defenders of the economy, rather than as agents of the government willing to spend hundreds of millions of taxpayers' dollars on Wall Street. Indeed, the framing of the article is geared away from Wall Street and towards the overall economy.

For the reader, the Wall Street Journal piece takes on a more sober-minded tone, but this can easily attributed to the fact that there is less of an implicit call to action in the article. Krugman as a blogger has more license to make emotional appeals than do the authors of the WSJ piece. Yet those authors do make use of emotional appeal. They portray crisis and impending doom in almost every sentence. Accompanying the article is a photograph of a very worried-looking Henry Paulson. There is actually little need for a call to action given the tenor of the article. The implicit call is to support the bailout because the health of the economy depends upon it. There is less focus on the long-term perspective because the situation is portrayed as dire and immediate. The Krugman piece, because it is implicitly aimed at voters, is framed in a more distant, long-term manner.

The Wall Street bailout elicited a substantial amount of press coverage and commentary. Because the issue is so complex, each article focuses on particular perspectives -- in Krugman's case the audience and in the Wall Street Journal's case the regulators'. Krugman's piece is an opinion piece, and therefore is apt to have a specific perspective. Yet we can see that the WSJ piece, a news article, also bears a specific perspective. Both pieces want the reader to view the issue in a specific way. The Krugman piece ultimately brings the reader to viewing the high cost of the bailout as being taxpayer money directed to Wall Street banks. The WSJ piece wants the reader to view the bailout as regulators working hard to save the economy. Each story is not reported in the other piece, providing a classic example of cognitive framing. The reader is guided to see the issue from one perspective, and in that perspective will come to one particular judgment about the merits of the bailout.

Works Cited:

Krugman, P. (2008). Thinking the bailout through. New York Times. Retrieved April 28, 2010 from http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/thinking-the-bailout-through/

Solomon, D., Rappaport, L., Paletta, D. & Hilsenrath, J. (2008). Shock forced Paulson's hand. Wall Street Journal. Retrieved April 28, 2010 from http://online.wsj.com/article/SB122186563104158747.html?mod=googlenews_wsj