Why the media don’t understand money

This is a recent talk I gave to the annual conference for the non-governmental organisation Positive Money.

A word to make clear my interests: Positive Money is an organisation whose work I greatly admire and for whom I have done some volunteer work in the last year or so and for whom I may do more in the future.

I choose to do that work, while also being a journalist, because I think the structural failures of our governance systems are such that they are an integral part of any story political journalists should be covering. That is true of debt-based money, the issue raised by Positive Money, but also of other issues such as poverty, inequality, incessant Western war-mongering and environmental despoliation.

Our leaders’ feeble attempts at regulating banks, international finance and global markets have totally failed, leading to ongoing financial crises since the global meltdown of 2007-2008. The false debates created with regard to conventional economics, and our policymakers’ fixation with a sterile definition of prosperity as determined by economic growth, are major barriers to change. Conventional media themselves fail to convey the extent of these governance problems, or even to appreciate that governance issues are the problem.

The question I was tasked to answer was why conventional media don’t “get” the idea of debt-based money. My answer could be easily adapted to fit these various other issues, as I make clear in Fraudcast News – How Bad Journalism Supports Our Bogus Democracies.