Journalists rooting for depression?

An Investor’s Business Daily editorial makes the argument that many of the journalists covering the economic crisis are rooting for another depression.

The editorial states, “Yet there seems to be no shortage of reporters writing and talking in almost gleeful terms about the possibility of economic ruin. They’re careful not to overtly welcome a depression, but in much of the reporting the tone gives it away.

“Steven Pearlstein, then a Washington Post business reporter and now a Post columnist, wrote in February that ‘the best thing that could happen to our economy is for a dozen high-profile hedge funds to collapse; for investment banking to enter a long, deep freeze; for a major bank to fail; and for the price of a typical Park Avenue duplex to fall by 30%’

“‘For only then,’ he said, ‘might we finally stop genuflecting before the altar of unregulated financial markets and insist that Wall Street serve the interest of Main Street, rather than the other way around.’

“At the Nation, a left-wing magazine that has long supported the sort of economic policies that would bring another depression, Katrina Vanden Heuvel isn’t shy in yearning for the central planning of the 1930s. The public, she wrote Monday, should ‘expect to hear more of this line of attack on public spending as conservatives fight tooth and nail to prevent a new New Deal.'”

Read more here.