Greece in Financial Crisis

This post is about a story run by the NBC Evening News on June 15, 2011 detailing the violent actions in the streets of Greece by tens of thousands of protestors. The protestors' goal was to prevent the government from making the deeper cuts needed to secure an additional 100 billion dollar loan from the European Union in order to prevent Greece from defaulting on its loans and threatening the global economy. One year previous, Greece had received a 158 billion dollar loan upon its agreement to make deep cuts, all to keep Greece afloat financially.

The piece seemed to be told from a neutral viewpoint, but did seem to leave out some critical background information as to how Greece arrived in this position where it is in such deep, unsustainable debt in the first place. They story focused on the potential domino effect if Greece were to default, and included video of the protests.

The potential for a corresponding decline in the U.S. stock market was discussed as the government of Greece teetered on the edge of collapse. The message overall was one of awareness and though the situation presented was indeed dire, I felt that NBC sensationalized it for their ratings benefit, as I could not detect any other motives for NBC running the story, and the language used seemed to be focused on a worst-case scenario and was repeated multiple times.