A Quick and Easy Fix: How the Media Framed Central Banks' Communication during the Post-Crisis Period ꟷ A Case Study on the National Bank of Romania

During the financial crisis that started in 2008 the loss of public trust in the main institutions of the financial industry affected central banks as well. The role and strategy of central banks in using monetary policy tools, including communication, was redesigned. Whether bringing interest rates close to zero or on negative territory, adopting quantitative or qualitative easing measures or practicing forward guidance, central banks communicated more extensively compared to the pre-crisis period. Although banking regulation and fiscal policy don’t represent explicit fundamental goals for most central banks in the world, the communication of monetary policy objectives was sometimes sent to the background during the crisis by the messages related to the banking system regulation and supervision or by the statements linked to the new fiscal measures. Reference to the Romanian market, National Bank of Romania (NBR) become target for populist politicians and was involved in the debates related to the Tax Code changes; the Swiss franc loans crisis; the Greek-owned banks crisis; the changes to the law of mortgage lending. This research analyses the Romanian news media coverage of the public debates and the NBR institutional discourse on all of the issues that erupted during 2016 – 2018 in Romanian economy. The paper aims at identifying the use of news frames as defined by Semetko and Valkenburg (2000) when studying how the European politics was framed by the Dutch national news media: “conflict”, “human interest”, “attribution of responsibility”, “morality” and “economic consequences”. The findings could provide an important basis for understanding how framing of news varied by topic while reflecting the NBR institutional response to specific economic issues after 2008. In the same time, the results could become a consistent starting point for a future research needed to test if there is a link between the framing process and the credibility loss that affected NBR during post-crisis period.