“There was also a piece on ABC Evening News last night about the housing boom )

And on NBC, CBS, PBS, CNBC, the NYTimes, WSJ, LATimes, every newspaper, every magazine, etc.

Yet last week’s Gallup Poll shows that 77% of Americans had never heard of “the housing bubble”. That’s not 3 out of 4 who disagree that there is a housing bubble, but 3 out of 4 who have never heard a peep about housing prices getting a wee bit frisky.

Jeebus H. Kee-riced!

Are 3 out of 4 people illiterate or simply don’t read or watch the news? Now we know why the ratings for American Idol and Desperate Housewives are so high.”

I guess now you’re going to ask why didn’t those journalists go round in person and slap every homeowner round the face with a wet haddock and scream: “Wake up dumbass, there’s a bubble!” Or that the commenter dreamt up all those headlines from, erm, more than two years ago.

You could argue that the discussion was in the business pages versus the property pages, but it was there. And, in fact, in all of this discussion, the one person who has not presented evidence to back up your position it is yourself. You declare that there is a mismatch, yet I have seen no quantifiable justification for your position only your opinion that “the press didn’t do enough”. Basic searches on news sources reveal hundreds of references to phrases like “housing bubble”. Where is your evidence that warnings weren’t there?

Furthermore, where is your evidence that journalists on newspapers etc suppressed concerns about the housing bubble because they wanted the property advertising? Those are big accusations. Do you have proof?

Again, I’m not saying this is solely the media’s fault. Lord knows the regulators basically ignored this until way, way, way too late. But if journalists had piled onto the story early, we might be in less trouble than we are today.

One of the newsweeklies had a story last week — last week — blaming Wall Street for the bubble and explaining a lot of this. As you say, now they tell us.

They also quoted a woman who discovered that the paperwork for her mortgage listed her income at double the actual amount. I am skeptical that she didn’t know. Extremely skeptical. Yet there’s not a hint in the story that she might have been in on the arrangement…

My experience as a news consumer was no shortage of housing bubble stories but almost nothing on CDOs, or collareralized debt obligations — the funny money bond-like instruments issued by bank-like institutions that aren’t banks and thus aren’t regulated. What I read about hedge funds was awe-struck stories how many tons of millions their operators were making, not about how they made the tons of millions in ways that undermined the financial structure.

With the exception of Paul Krugman’s op-ed column in The Times, I saw almost nothing that even began to poke at such stories. Granted, the hedge funds and Wall Street financial wizards work hard at being opaque. But for ideal news organizations, the more veiled the secrets the greater the reason to do the hard reporting that will pull back the curtain and expose the secrets to the light and air.

Right now the inherent flimsiness of CDOs has cracked them open to the light and air. Wouldn’t it have been better if reporters had cracked them open a long time ago?

In his op-ed column about energy efficiency and global warming in today’s Times, Nick Kristoff crystalizes the weakness in business as usual in our news organizations : “I can’t help feeling that we in the news media are part of the reason that steps to battle climate change aren’t on top of the national agenda. We’re good at covering things that happen on any one day — like a tornado or hurricane — but weak at covering complex trends, like climate change.”

Same with financial ecology.

I cited a few stories because I was able to find them in a few minutes of searching, not as an exhaustive accounting of all of the reporting the Post did. As it stands, though, it’s a greater body of evidence than you have so far supplied to back your assertions (stated and implied) that journalists either knowingly or ignorantly boosted the housing market and may have done so for their own benefit. I’d like to see some evidence of this – if you have specific reporters or papers who engaged in those tactics, I think we’d all be the better for knowing who they are.

Derek