Danny Schechter - ColdType

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coming. He noted, “It’s an enormous blot on the reputation
of the profession. There are thousands of economists. Most of
them teach. And most of them teach a theoretical framework
that has been shown to be fundamentally useless.”
If a top economist will criticize his colleagues, why won’t
leaders in the media examine how the industry got it so
wrong?
Today, we are all alarmed by the rapidly spreading global
crisis. My book Plunder investigates three aspects of it: the
practices of the mortgage industry and Wall Street firms, the
regulators who didn’t regulate, and the media that was often
complicit. Not only were there few investigations of subprime
predatory practices between 2002 and 2007, but also, media
companies took billions – that’s right, billions – in advertising
revenue from dodgy lenders and credit card companies. We
had gone from telling to selling.
One of the key sources of revenue for newspapers is real
estate advertising in weekend supplements and classified sections.
The newspaper industry became in some communities
the marketing arm of the real estate industry. In some cities
you actually had newspapers getting a piece of the action of
sales through the ads that they had generated – they were
part of the corruption. So of course there was little real scrutiny
about what was actually happening in the neighborhoods
where mortgage fraud was pervasive, where people who
couldn’t afford to buy houses were buying them with bogus
mortgages. Some newspapers were making money on the
sales of these homes.
While coverage in Europe may have been better once the
crisis erupted, there had been little reporting on or questioning
of the large investments by European and Asian banks in subprime
securities, many based on shoddy and discriminatory
lending practices. Some of those banks would later collapse or
write off billions because these “asset-backed” securities had
no assets backing them. They would blame the Americans for