Power Problem : Columbia Journalism Review
The fact is, you don't need to be a media critic or a quant to assess whether proper warnings were provided. What's more, I suspect most rank-and-file reporters would welcome scrutiny, as long as it's fair. And so we undertook a project with a simple goal: to assess whether the business press, as it claims, provided the public with fair warning of looming dangers during the years when it could have made a difference. I'm going to provide a sneak preview of our findings: the answer is no. The record shows that the press published its hardest-hitting investigations of lenders and Wall Street between 2000-2003, for reasons I will attempt to explain below, then lapsed into useful-but-not-sufficient consumer- and investor-oriented stories during the critical years of 2004-2006. Missing are investigative stories that confront directly powerful institutions about basic business practices while those institutions were still powerful. This is not a detail. This is the watchdog that didn't bark. To the contrary, the record is clogged with feature stories about banks ("Countrywide Writes Mortgages for the Masses," WSJ, 12/21/04) and Wall Street firms ("Distinct Culture at Bear Stearns Helps It Surmount a Grim Market," The New York Times, 3/28/03) that covered the central players in this drama but wrote about anything but abusive lending and how it was funded. Far from warnings, the message here was: "All clear." Finally, the press scrambled in late 2006 and especially early 2007 as the consequences of the institutionalized corruption of the financial system became apparent to one and all. So the idea that the press did all it could, and the public just missed it, is not just untenable. It is also untrue.
The fact is, you don't need to be a media critic or a quant to assess whether proper warnings were provided. What's more, I suspect most rank-and-file reporters would welcome scrutiny, as long as it's fair. And so we undertook a project with a simple goal: to assess whether the business press, as it claims, provided the public with fair warning of looming dangers during the years when it could have made a difference.
I'm going to provide a sneak preview of our findings: the answer is no. The record shows that the press published its hardest-hitting investigations of lenders and Wall Street between 2000-2003, for reasons I will attempt to explain below, then lapsed into useful-but-not-sufficient consumer- and investor-oriented stories during the critical years of 2004-2006. Missing are investigative stories that confront directly powerful institutions about basic business practices while those institutions were still powerful. This is not a detail. This is the watchdog that didn't bark.
To the contrary, the record is clogged with feature stories about banks ("Countrywide Writes Mortgages for the Masses," WSJ, 12/21/04) and Wall Street firms ("Distinct Culture at Bear Stearns Helps It Surmount a Grim Market," The New York Times, 3/28/03) that covered the central players in this drama but wrote about anything but abusive lending and how it was funded. Far from warnings, the message here was: "All clear."
Finally, the press scrambled in late 2006 and especially early 2007 as the consequences of the institutionalized corruption of the financial system became apparent to one and all.
So the idea that the press did all it could, and the public just missed it, is not just untenable. It is also untrue.
The information was there, and a lot of warnings were made pretty explicitly. The problem is that these warnings rarely made headlines, and were certainly not incorporated into the "common wisdom" discourse that otherwise permeated editorials and background context for other articles.
So they were not very visible. But if you read these papers while aware of their biases, all the info was there, in excruciating detail. In the long run, we're all dead. John Maynard Keynes
Just a tiny teeny little difference: based on the same body of facts, the business papers opinion-makers touted a line of "Everything is fine in this brave new world" while you exposed the bullshit... Europeans think a hundred miles is a long way. Americans think a hundred years is a long time.
