Has financial media declared war on America?

I discovered an interesting blog today written by a 24-year-old named Steve Petersen, who lives in Utah. He recently wrote a commentary about the financial media, and an excerpt is below.

Petersen wrote, “This is why the economy tanking is great news for investors, but it is not necessarily welcome news for the rest of us. Our standard of living is tied to the country’s GDP, which measures the environment in which creates jobs and sets wages. A dip in GDP is only good for investors some of the time but not for the rest of us.

“Financial journalism has magnified this queerness of investors, and this is manifested in more ways than just dandy news of a tanking economy.

“For instance, CNBC is known to fuel a temporary spike in a stock’s price if its company is positively mentioned on air. It does not take much as Howard Kurtz chronicles in his book The Fortunate Tellers from 2000. Sometimes all it takes is a willing journalist to demo a widget on air, but this boost quickly fades. Oh, the fun of day trading.

“Such attention also inspires companies to do virtually whatever it takes to boost their profits so that they can attract more capital from potential investors. While there are many ways to legitimately boost corporate performance, corruption works as well. All it takes to conjure such images are single words like ‘Enron.’

“Granted, a beat full of aggressive journalists can expose fraud, but where was the financial press when Enron and Arthur Andersen head honchos were cooking the books? How many innocent employees and families were financially devastated by the downfall of the energy behemoth? No wonder why the 2005 Jim Carrey and Tea Leoni remake of the 1977 flick Fun with Dick and Jane about a desperate family suffering after a fictional Enron collapsed, which left them nothing with nowhere to go, resonates so well with contemporary America.”

Read more here.