Regulators, industry and public to blame, not biz media

Dave Beal, a longtime business journalist in the Minneapolis area who is now interim executive director for the Society of American Business Editors and Writers, argues in the March issue of Twin Cities Busines that the media is not to blame for the current financial meltdown.

Beal writes, “‘You can’t blame this on the press,’ says Steve Leuthold, chief investment officer at Leuthold Group LLC, a financial research and investment firm. “Nobody I knew every talked about the whole credit system seizing up the way it did.’

“Chuck Denny, retired CEO at ADC Telecommunications in Eden Prairie, says, ‘I think the media were doing their job.’

“Claudia Parliament, director of the Minnesota Council on Economic Education in St. Paul, says partly the trouble is rooted in a widespread lack of financial literacy. Given that, it seems unlikely that Americans would heed warnings of economic trouble, regardless of what media outlets said.”

The article is not yet online. The magazine’s Web site is here.