Categories: OLD Media Moves

Biz media could have done a better job on economy

William Powers of the National Journal notes that there’s a lot of finger pointing in the media these days about who’s to blame for the current economy, but the business media isn’t pointing fingers at itself.

Powers writes, “Journalists focused on the surface aspects of the bubble — rising home prices, growing consumer debt — and didn’t work hard enough to figure out what was happening at the ‘highly sophisticated level’ where the richest and most powerful make their money.

“To draw a rough analogy, it’s a bit like what happened in the run-up to the Iraq war. A lot of smart people in the media thought that something might be fishy in the administration’s WMD claims. And a few news outlets dug into the fishiness and poked some holes in those claims. But by and large, the media culture was content to see what it could see, report the soothing things that senior officials said, and leave it at that.

“Covering financial markets is very tricky because there are myriad levels, many of them hidden and arcane. The easy route is the well-trodden one followed by CNBC and other popular outlets: Cover the markets as a fun game that anyone can win. And go along with the popular mood. When the bulls are running, cheer them on. When there’s blood in the streets, cry murder, while assuring your audience that good times could be just around the corner. Because that’s what people want to hear.”

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Dave says:
March 30, 2008 at 11:28 am
Chris, i hate to say this but this has been a no-brainer for a decade. Financial Journalists have become lazy and work the stories of their sources instead of actually digging in and investigating what is really taking place in the markets and our economy.
Today with cutbacks in staff the media outlets force writers into more stories to fill space and thus the quality of such reporting is being reduced. Everybody is reporting the same surface level information with few if any actually digging into the bowels of what is really taking place.
SABEW is a society with the charter of bettering business journalism but after reading transcripts of past SABEW conferences it is clear that SABEW members do not have the desire to alter the course of where financial media is going.