Introduced in 2009 in the bowels of the internet, bitcoin has achieved legitimacy as an investment asset on much of Wall Street. For that reason alone the cryptocurrency constitutes a remarkable digital story. Yet, Media and Communication Studies have paid relatively little attention to bitcoin, despite a focus on the internet and everything digital. This paper begins to mend this gap with a thematic analysis of how the Financial Times commented on bitcoin until the summer of 2024. The analysis finds that the newspaper with a global reach consistently depicted bitcoin as a deeply flawed project and in a price bubble. The Financial Times also tracked bitcoin's growing adoption by traditional finance and occasionally pointed to its potential and especially that of the blockchain that is part of it. This paper explains the findings with the framework of the political economy of journalism.
Tabe Bergman (Thu,) studied this question.