Reporting Accounting?

Abstract

While the increasing visibility of accounting in economic life has also been accompanied by criticisms of financial reporting and the accounting profession, there have been few studies that chart this rise and examine the events and issues which attracted attention. This paper examines the public face of accounting as mediated by the press by studying the major accounting causes celebres which occurred in Britain between 1962–92. The paper presents the evidence as it relates to the events, their frequency, characteristics and the substantive issues pertaining to financial reporting. It analyses what becomes accounting news and what does not. It has two inter‐related aims; to examine firstly accounting’s increasing visibility in the context of corporate activity and secondly the issues and concerns thereby raised and what they reflect. Accounting events which become ‘public’ in the press do so because of their importance to the financial sector rather than other sections of society. To a large extent therefore, this ‘public opinion’ expressed in the reporting of accounting in the press reflects the financial sector’s interests. The absence of detailed and informed comment on contemporary financial events on the part of accounting scholars enables the interest of the financial sector to be equated, as a consequence, with the ‘public interest’.