Danny Schechter - ColdType

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cial journalists should be more aware of how their coverage
can affect sentiment, Financial Times editor Lionel Barber, and
Alex Brummer, financial editor of the Daily Mail. The Select
Committee said it would weigh whether financial journalists
should exercise greater restraint during periods of market turbulence
and whether any kind of reporting restrictions should
be applied during such periods. The journalists it mentioned
were largely on top of the story; countless others were not.
Funny how there was no inquiry about lack of coverage of a
pending crisis. Now, suddenly, it’s the media’s fault.
What accounts for this media failure? I wrote to John Gittelsohn
of California’s Orange County Register whose work on
the mortgage fraud issues I admired. He wrote back indicting
the media’s lack of depth and resources, the way our media
system has cut back costly investigations because of our own
financial crises. He cited another factor – fear of lawsuits. Businesses
were eager to silence or suppress “bad press” in an era
when so many wealthy companies had invested in sophisticated
public relations.
So what’s to be done? Hutton calls for the media to ask
tougher questions, but that may not be enough – journalists
need to be educated, or re-educated, in the dark arts of financial
institutions. During an interview recently on the World
Association of Newspapers’ editors weblog, the FT’s managing
editor Daniel Bogler wrote, “It’s unfortunate that the financial
literacy and understanding of how things work in the City and
of basic accounting and so on, is actually very thin in financial
journalism.”
On the night I wrote this piece I chatted with a senior editor
of the New York Times who deals with news ethics and
practices. I set out my critique, arguing that despite a few early
strong articles in the Times, most of the paper missed the runup
to the crisis just as much of the press was uncritical of the
run-up to the war in Iraq. I thought he would argue with me.
He didn’t.