Danny Schechter - ColdType

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problem,’ words he ended up eating a few days later while
trying, unsuccessfully, to rescue Germany’s Hypo Real Estate
banking group).”
Global media has a responsibility to do a better job covering
the crisis and also acknowledging its own role. I am not the
only media critic raising this issue.
Howard Kurtz writes in the Washington Post: “As news organizations
chase exclusives about the Wall Street meltdown,
they also are grappling with a troubling question: Why didn’t
they see this coming?”
“We all failed,” says Steven Gasparino, a former Wall Street
Journal and Newsweek reporter. “What we didn’t understand
was that this was building up. We all bear responsibility to a
certain extent.”
“The shaky house of financial cards that has come tumbling
down was erected largely in public view: overextended investment
banks, risky practices by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac,
exotic mortgage instruments that became part of a shadow
banking system. But while these were conveyed in incremental
stories – and a few whistle-blowing columns – the business
press never conveyed a real sense of alarm until institutions
began to collapse.”
Former business journalist Dean Starkman, once with the
Wall Street Journal, who now covers the business media for the
Columbia Journalism Review agreed, telling me, “The business
press did not really recognize and understand what they were
up against, how dramatically the world had changed, how the
lending industry had changed, how out of control Wall Street
had become. They were to me extremely slow to recognize,
appreciate and confront the changes in the financial system.”
He also believed there was a relationship between the advertising
revenues and the quality of journalism: “They made a
lot of money. Again that was a big miss. A lot of time was
spent on [reporting] the personalities, but not on how those