E&P: Where Was Media When Sub-Prime Disaster Unfolded? [View All]

[Robbien]

If we were long on the edge of "disaster" with a "financial nuclear winter" waiting in the wings, why were American news consumers among the last to know?

By Danny Schechter

(March 27, 2008) -- "It is somewhat surprising," Larry Elliott, economics editor of London's The Guardian observed recently, "that there is not already rioting in the streets, given the gigantic fraud perpetrated by the financial elite at the expense of ordinary Americans.” If such a fraud was taking place, and if Wall Street’s financial crisis, according to the usually staid Economist, was on the edge of “disaster” with a “financial nuclear winter” waiting in the wings, why were American news consumers among the last to know?

On the fifth anniversary of the war in Iraq, our press was papered with retrospectives that dealt with every aspect of the conflict except its own miscoverage. At the same time, another and, arguably, more serious crisis had been underway longer and covered even more poorly.


The New York Times finally got around to examining war reporting as a business not journalism story on March 24 (below the fold), well after the unhappy anniversary. The story cited as a prime excuse for the fall-off in coverage, a study suggesting a “decline in public interest” as if that was not influenced by the lack of the issue’s visibility. Other factors were the expense and danger of covering a Iraq.

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Was the press just not paying attention as hundreds of billions of dollars were swept into exotic structure investment vehicles over years, and then sliced and diced into CDO’s and so-called asset based securities? A New York Times columnist even admitted that experts and advocates first warned them in 2001 that predatory lending practices were devastating poor neighborhoods but the issue was not covered in any depth for five years. This has resulted in nearly three million families facing foreclosure and the rest of us losing share and home values.

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