Sunday, September 21, 2008

Crash Coverage

In the midst of a historical Wall Street crisis, Wall Street reporters are getting their share of evaluations. According to CBS the judgment is hardly positive. Two days after Bank of America’s acquisition of Merill Lynch, MarketWatch's Jon Friedman accused the press of “Wimpy Wall Street Coverage.” The financial journalists at the press conference, he says, lacked the skepticism that should have come with “yet another glaring sign of greed, stupidity and mismanagement on Wall Street.” Where were the tough biting questions, and why were the CEO’s treated with such obsequiousness? But the ruling was not all bad. Columbia Journalism Review’s Dean Starkman is all praises and and is happy to name names – “It should be said, the business press, led by the Times and the Journal , has covered the emergency with skill, energy, sophistication and grace under pressure.” As financial news moves to front page headlines, the press is reacting to a disastrous situation with aptly disastrous coverage, charged with doomsday superlatives.
Wall Street journalists have a tough job carved out for them. Even Friedman was ready to acknowledge the difficulty of deciphering financial jargon. He quotes an email from his expert Elizabeth MacDonald, Fox Business Network’s stocks editor: “This is the most complicated financial crisis to have ever hit the stock market, involving highly complex, exotic derivatives that clearly not even Wall Street understands given the steady drip of colossal write-downs.” With mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations becoming a part of dinner table conversation, some credit has to be given the journalists on Wall Street beat.

1 comment:

M. Dery said...

Some colorful turns of phrase. Strong use of supporting links.

Now, The "But":

"With mortgage-backed securities and collateralized debt obligations becoming a part of dinner table conversation, some credit has to be given the journalists on Wall Street beat."

Not so fast. Your enthusiasm for what you claim is the business press's (newfound, I would argue) tough-mindedness leads you to ignore historical context on two levels: one, the recent history of the business press's coverage of Wall Street, which some media critics would argue has been anything BUT tenacious, and two, the business press's historical role as a cheerleader for the Masters of the Universe in tasseled loafers, lionizing Alpha Male CEO's, rags-to-riches entrepreneurs, and companies that can do no wrong. How much applausive ink was spilled over Enron, for example, before that whole Ponzi scheme went splat? Also, what was the media's role in pumping up the Internet bubble of the '90s before it went BANG? There was much soul-searching, among journalism-department chairs and press critics, about the media's role in that debacle. Then, once the public self-flagellation was over, it was business as usual. Leading to...this meltdown?