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It was startling to watch a Fox News interview in December<br />
2006, where other guests praised the economy and poo-pooed<br />
Schiff ’s argument, actually laughing at him on-the-air: “It was<br />
like there’s no way that this could happen,” he said about how his<br />
forecast of the coming collapse was regarded, “I’m just a pariah of<br />
global doom. I’m Chicken Little. This is a fantastic economy.”<br />
What also seemed increasingly clear was that Fox was not<br />
really a news channel. It looked like one, followed its formats<br />
with lots of spice and attractive females designed to reel in its<br />
overwhelmingly male audience, but it had more of a political<br />
function than a journalistic one as New York Times op-ed<br />
columnist Paul Krugman told my partner Rory O’Connor:<br />
“There’s nothing like Fox News. There’s no liberal news organization<br />
like Fox News. I wrote during the 2000 campaign that<br />
if Bush said that the earth was flat, the media would have<br />
headlined “some different opinions about the earth’s shape.<br />
“Look we have a situation now in which there are several<br />
major parts of the news media that are, for all intents and purposes,<br />
part of movement conservatism. There’s the New York<br />
Post, the Washington Times, which other news organizations<br />
are intimidated with these to some extent.”<br />
It wasn’t just Fox’s News and Business Channels that<br />
missed the real story. They all followed the same approach, as<br />
Hendrik Hertzberg, a senior editor of the New Yorker, told me:<br />
“TV financial journalism, particularly the business networks,<br />
are sort of like the sports networks. You know they’re really<br />
there for. And the idea that the stock market is a wonderful<br />
game and it’s you’re going to win not lose when you play it.”<br />
Financial Journalist Gary Weiss saw the same problem: “the<br />
general tenor of the coverage is going to be to celebrate the<br />
Street, to celebrate CEOs, and not to give critical scrutiny that<br />
questions the way they do business. You know the coverage,<br />
when you get there, will be critical scrutiny with the way individual<br />
companies operate and critical scrutiny of individual<br />
CEOs. But you won’t get coverage that looks at what’s hap-
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