E&P: Wash Post’s Brauchli: Newspapers Warned Readers of Economic Crisis. “There were good stories throughout, good stories about the risks,” Brauchli added. “The truth is, there was always skeptical coverage by the major newspapers. The Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Financial Times, all have written about these issues. The scale of derivatives, the rapid growth of unregulated, over-the-counter securities, the risk in financial institutions.”
This chest-thumping deserves as much credibility as Sarah Palin’s claims to foreign-policy expertise.
I’m working on a longer piece about this, but I’ll say again what I’ve been saying in recent months: Whether traditional media people want to admit it or not — they obviously do not — they didn’t do nearly the job they should have. The occasional good story about the risks doesn’t begin to make up for the incessant cheerleading the press did during the inflation of this bubble, not to mention the stock bubble of the 1990s.
Ask yourself: If the media had done their jobs, would there have been such widespread shock at discovering the mess we’re in? This answers itself. The answer is a loud No. It should inspire shame, not bragging.
on Oct 1st, 2008 at 10:49 pm
Hey, if you can find a smoking gun here — like a real estate section editor who had an idea to show some mortgage industry indicators as a regular feature, but got canned by an editor — that would be great.