Cable news and the financial crisis

Kevin Allocca of TVNewser attended a panel on how cable television covered the financial crisis of the past 18 month at Bloomberg’s New York office and filed this report.

Allocca writes, “Bloomberg TV’s Margaret Brennan facilitated the audience Q&A, but first had an interesting question of her own: what role did financial cable news play in all this?

“NYT’s Andrew Ross Sorkin said he watched ‘countless hours of television to see what people were talking about at the time,’ while doing research for his book ‘Too Big to Fail.’ He said he believes cable news did have a big impact: ‘It was the TV and the actual personalization of it — the actual watching another human being say it — that I think actually changed the resonance for people. I will say it did push the panic…because it was human.’

“Bryan Burrough, author of ‘Barbarians at the Gate,’ criticized some of the reporting on Bear Stearns: ‘The fact is, you guys just had too much time to fill and there were too many places where you can point to irresponsible speculation. Your job — you, a TV journalist — is not to reflect. There may be guys running around the 7th floor opening windows and panicking, you’re job is not to say ‘Gosh Wall Street’s panicking,’ it’s to look at facts.'”

Read more here.