Did the watchdog forget to bark?
The opening panel at the Society of American Business Editors and Writers annual meet in Denver addressed an interesting question: Did 9,000 business journalists blow it when it came to ringing the alarm bells on the financial meltdown?
The five SABEW panelists — The New York Times’ business editor Larry Ingrassia, Columbia Journalism Review critic and former Wall Street Journal reporter Dean Starkman, personal finance columnist Jane Bryant Quinn, Emmy-winning former ABC News investigative reporter Allan Dodds Frank and Greg Miller, a professor at the University of Michigan — agreed that the financial press could have done more. Newspapers, wire services, magazines and television stations could have been more aggressive, and they could have taken more pains to explain why complex things like mortgage-backed securities might matter to the average reader.
But journalists can hardly be accused of “blowing it” when even doomsday pundits like Bob Shiller and Nouriel Roubini could predict only parts of the nightmare scenario that is unfolding in the U.S. economy right now, the panelists said.
CJR’s Starkman, who’s just completed a “deep dive” into the news coverage leading up to the financial crisis, said his report, which will be up for public consumption next month, found that the top journalism outlets didn’t do a good enough job of signalling that the tiny sparks in the housing and securities markets could flame up into a giant financial blaze.
“If the question is, did the business press provide adequate warnings to the public about the crisis, the answer is negative,” Starkman said. His 6,400-word report, which surveyed scores of articles in publications like the NYT, WSJ, Forbes, Fortune and others between January 2000 and June 2007, concludes that the investigative reporting started out strong but then downshifted to “good, but not sufficient,” as reporters wrote about the housing bubble and defective mortgage products, but failed to focus on the lenders.
The Times’ Ingrassia took issue with Starkman’s as-yet-unreleased report, rattling off a long list of stories his paper had done in the early years about ”predatory home equity loans (that) were being diced into mortgage-backed securities,” out-of-control mortgage markets and even excess executive pay. “I think the record shows that the press was there in laying the groundwork and ringing the alarm bell.” But, Ingrassia added, there was little more reporters could do if regulators didn’t heed the news and readers didn’t “seem receptive” to it.
Would politicians have done something to avert the crisis if people had cared more and pressed their legislators for better regulation? Which begs a further question — did reporters fail to write stories in a way that would make people sit up and take notice?
The media, the economy and you
Media coverage of economic troubles in the past 18 months has shifted repeatedly in the last year from a narrative about mortgages to one about recession, a banking crisis and now largely gas prices, according to a new report from the Project for Excellence in Journalism in Washington, D.C.
All this is good to know, but the bigger question is why it has progressed the way it has. Fortunately for us, PEJ digs right into it.(And before the meat, here’s the methodology: The PEJ study is based on an analysis of more than 5,000 economic stories from January 1, 2007, through June 30, 2008, drawn from 1,950 hours of programming on the three major cable news cable channels, 390 on network morning and evening TV, 910 on radio, and 468 days’ editions of 21 different newspapers, and the five leading news websites, some 48 different news outlets in all.)Here’s an excerpt:
[The] connection between media coverage and economic events has often been uneven. Sometimes, coverage has lagged months behind economic activity, when the storyline was dependent on government data. Other times, coverage has tracked events erratically, as with housing and inflation. … But when the story is easier to tell, as in the case of gas prices, coverage has been closely tied to what is actually occurring in the marketplace.
The economy has been the No. 2 story so far in 2008 in the U.S. media, moving ahead of the Iraq war but behind the presidential campaign. (Economy takes 8 percent of the space available for news; Iraq takes 3 percent; The campaign takes 37 percent) Often the press coverage has lagged behind economic events, sometimes by months. … The only change in the economy that reliably predicts more press coverage in the last year has been rising gas prices.While public attention to economic news does not always translate into more coverage, more coverage of the economy can be correlated to deepening public worries.
We’re not only looking for the easy stories, we’re also constantly behind, the study finds:
One gets a sense of a news industry curious about what is occurring in the economy but with limited handles to grab on to the story. The government data are one handle, though often months behind. Congressional testimony and statements by government officials in press conferences are another. The reaction of the private sector, through the stock market, quarterly earnings reports and the financial health of companies is a third. Yet all of these may tend to leave the media narrative lagging months behind what is going on in people’s lives.
When it comes to gasoline, however, we are there with bells on:
Tx Stephen – Will share this with colleagues here.
This article re-builds some of my trust in the media, obviously media is wading through an ocean of politics within and in their information sources. Post event analysis is something I never expected from a group that demonstrates “GLITZ N GLAMOUR” as their esoteric mantra.It’s also obvious they frequently go “out of their way” to help keep the new investors in the dark about how the pro traders harvest (predation) the funds of the new traders.Many of the dark spots on the media dalmation became glaringly obvious with their relationship with “W”.Public trust may never get back to where it use to be in the 40-50s due to the greed that exists in all of us.