Journalism as myth: Representing the Chinese stock market crisis of 2015

The tumults within China’s stock markets in the summer of 2015 riveted the international news media, which converged to speculate on the events' significance for the Chinese real economy and China's unorthodox adoption of market capitalism mixed with command-style economics. Stock markets, however, never signify by themselves – to see causality, sequence and higher-order signification in each day’s closing numbers is to find meanings beyond what is manifestly indicated by the represented event. That non-literal meanings appear self-evident to producers and consumers of the journalism indicates the operation of mythical meanings in the text, fulfilling Barthes’s (2012) famous prediction that no artefact of verbal production is ever safe from myth. A content analysis of journalism pertaining to the Chinese stock market shows the linguistic and semiological processes that operated in the text to transform stock market news into myths about the perils of betraying free market principles