Why did so many miss this story?

Thomas Frank writes in The Wall Street Journal Wednesday that there are many — including those in financial journalism — who need to come clean about why they missed the signs of the current economic crisis.

Frank writes, “But what about the syndicated columnists and the beloved stock pickers and the authors of personal finance best-sellers, the industry for which CNBC is the perfect symbol? How did they manage to miss the volcano under their feet?

“Mr. Cramer, for his part, had the forthrightness to confess his errors and admit his limitations. ‘I’m not Eric Sevareid. I’m not Edward R. Murrow,’ he pleaded. ‘I’m a guy trying to do an entertainment show about business for people to watch.’

“But the larger problem won’t go away. And it’s not just a matter of people missing the biggest economic story of the last 20 years. It’s a matter of those who minimized it and those who blew it off because it didn’t fit their worldview continuing in their plum positions of authority. Mr. Stewart wasn’t rude enough to ask it, but over all his inquiries there hung the obvious question: Why do you still have a job, Mr. Cramer?

“If the world of financial infotainment can itself be described as a ‘market,’ it is a market where accountability does not seem to exist, where the heaviest of incentives seems to carry no weight, and where consumers, to judge by what they get, seem constantly to choose the lousy over the good. The old order discredits itself, but the old order persists nevertheless.”

Read more here.