The gaping hole in financial journalism

Michael Massing, reviewing for The Nation the new book by William Cohan on Leon Black and Apollo Global Management, laments about a missed opportunity.

Massing writes, “The book devotes far more space to power struggles inside the firm and to Black’s relations with his father, Epstein, and his mistresses than it does to the transformative effect that Apollo and companies like it have had on America.

“It’s a missed opportunity that reflects a more general failing in how the media cover finance. Business sections bulge with stories about Silicon Valley and AI, Google and Apple, Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk. But when it comes to Wall Street and private equity, Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan Chase, Larry Fink and David Rubenstein, news organizations are largely missing in action.

“It’s impossible, however, to understand the economic malaise that has settled over America without considering the role of finance. Take the affordability crisis. Its immediate cause, of course, is rising prices, but the underlying cause is stagnant wages. As the Bureau of Labor Statistics recently noted, American workers’ share of national income fell to 52.8 percent in the second quarter of 2026—the lowest level since the bureau began tracking that figure in the first quarter of 1947. The share going to capital—executive compensation and shareholders—has risen accordingly.”

Read more here.