TALKING BIZ NEWS EXCLUSIVE
Marketwatch has had some of the best reporting about disgraced hedge fund manager Bernard Madoff in the past 10 days.
In particular, a column by Robert Powell posted Monday about how his wife lost her 401(k) and her job due to the failure of Madoff’s company was poignant.
I asked David Callaway, Marketwatch’s editor in chief, why that’s the case.
Callaway replied via e-mail, “No real discussion or decision about it, to be honest. If we do a story about the list of victims, we’d certainly include him, perhaps somewhere between Spielberg and Zuckerman.”
Callaway later stated, “If Irwin felt compelled to write about it, we’d be happy to take a look. But his brief is really economics, where Powell’s topic is personal finance and individual asset management, which ties in much closer with the scandal.”
I’ll accept Callaway’s rationale, but I’m still uneasy that Marketwatch hasn’t disclosed that one of its “name” columnists has a vested interest in how the Madoff case plays out. In business journalism, it’s always safe to err on the side of caution and disclose as much as possible.
To Callaway’s credit, he notes how aggressive Marketwatch has been in covering the case. He stated, “Powell’s piece was so unique and personal, and early on in the breaking scandal, that it really covered the victims angle for us in a way that competitors didn’t have, so we just linked to WSJ’s story list of victims and moved on to other stuff, such as this excellent piece last night by Alistair Barr on how Madoff’s arrangements with hedge funds worked and how it might have exploded ten years ago.”
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Not all in this Madoff mess were rich or greedy, just hard working people who saved all their lives. Losing faith in market,funds, brokerage accounts and banks it seemed a conservative approach, at least to the unsophistocated investor. In our 60s and 70s now , we put our entire pension, IRA and savings with our long term friend (who helped get us into the fund as we did not meet the threshold of $2m) we eventually lost all $4m and that was grew not because of BIG gains rather by our continued contributions and few withdrawals. Our total investment was $2.8. The only withdrawals were for mandatory retirement at 70 1/2, and we took the minimal. We have a severely handicapped daughter who requires daily care for rest of her life and that money was to give us peace of mind that she would be cared for when we could no longer do it. We were not greedy, we were stupid, we believed we could trust people. We are both educated professionals who spent our time on OUR jobs and left the money management to who we thought were Professionals.