Bartiromo defends financial journalism

CNBC anchor Maria Bartiromo was on the Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC radio on Friday, talking about her new book The Weekend That Changed Wall Street: An Eyewitness Account, and her opinion of coverage of the financial meltdown.

During the September 2008 weekend that the crisis began, Bartiromo said she was “working, covering the story, taking phone calls, making phone calls…trying to make sense of the story.”

When a caller asked Bartiromo why she and other financial journalists didn’t predict the crisis, she responded, “It was just this mania where everybody believed that home prices would continue to go up…It’s not just the media.”

When Lehrer asked Bartiromo if she and other financial journalists “drank the Kool-Aid,” she pushed back.

“CNBC has 14 hours of live programming every day,” she said. “At any moment in the day, you could have turned on CNBC and seen me talking to George Soros, who said this is a house of cards about to collapse, or Peter Schiff, who said the same thing…”

“To say that the media missed it is not actually giving the media the credit of perspective,” she added. “I actually give credit to the media.” She then mentioned The Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times and other business media whom she thought did a good job.

“I think the investment media and the financial media handled this crisis quite well, making people accessible and explaining the issue” said Bartiromo. “…Everybody would like to blame the messenger.”

Listen to the entire interview here.