Starkman: The biz media won’t catch the next crisis

Asher Schechter of ProMarket, the blog of the Stigler Center at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, interviewed media critic Dean Starkman about the financial media’s coverage of the 2008 economic crisis.

Here is an excerpt:

Q: Eight years after the financial crisis, do you think business media is now better positioned to recognize systemic risks?

No, no, absolutely not. Media has been willfully ignoring people outside of elite circles since there was media, but what was interesting about the financial crisis is that we all paid for that kind of ignorance. It’s a rich irony that mortgages made a subway ride away from major media outlets — in places like East New York, Canarsie and Bedford Stuyvesant, as well as places like Cleveland, Newark, the south side of Chicago — blew apart the entire global financial system and rocked the world economy.

Has that lesson been learned? Hell no. Not at all. Are we better set up to cast the net more widely? To find dissenting voices and listen to them? Are we more open to seek out convincing whistleblowers and protect them? Do we have resources to knock on doors and climb stairs of tenement apartments? The answer is “no.” It’s the opposite.

The water crisis in Flint, Michigan is an example of that. This was not a state secret. People in Flint were jumping up and down for months. If people had learned the lesson of the financial crisis, there would have been intensive media coverage before the government eventually admitted there’s a problem.