Hearings on short selling

Today’s hearings on short selling should be interesting for business journalists in the wake of recent allegations that some reporters have been in cahoots with hedge funds and others who short stocks to drive down the price of shares.

Former BusinessWeek reporter Gary Weiss has a couple of nice postings about the hearings and notes that there are a couple of interesting witnesses who have been called to testify. One is a former employee of Gradient Analytics, which is being sued by Overstock.com. If you have been following the issue, Overstock’s leader, Patrick Byrne, has gone toe to toe with business journalists such as Marketwatch’s Herb Greenberg.

Weiss also notes the lack of fact-checking by the Columbia Journalism Review’s Daily blog on the issue. It is recommending readers check out a letter from a witness posted on the SanityCheck.com web site, when a more reputable web site for the letter would be The Wall Street Journal.

Writes Weiss: “Odd, don’t you think, that a journalism review — a site presumably devoted to advocating tough journalism — would link to the financial world’s leading enemy of tough journalism? Particularly since CJR could have linked to the place where ‘sanitycheck’ got the letter — the Wall Street Journal’s website? As you can see, the Aguirre material is available there, at no charge, to subscribers and nonsubscribers alike.”

Read more here.