Danny Schechter - ColdType

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I pressed Starkman on whether this type of coverage contributed
to the criminality in the financial industry.
He thought about it, and concluded:
“Essentially an entire industry became predatory …”
“Predatory, like criminal?” I asked him.
“I mean we are talking about, deceptive marketing on a
mass scale as a function of a corporate policy. Criminal? Yeah
… I’m just saying that the evidences at that point were overwhelming.
The borrowers were subjected to deceptive marketing
practices. A lot of time, I think, was spent on personality
driven reporting … not adequately explored.”
Economist Max Wolff did not disagree, “I think the media
gave free commercials for financial products. The media
became cheerleaders instead of critics. That took out a critical
voice that could have told people about this.”
Who could blame them for their skepticism? After all, the
U.S. was in the midst of an economic boom. After a decade
of unparalleled prosperity, the dot com bubble had burst in
2000. But then with help from the government and the Federal
Reserve Banks lowering the interest rates, the housing market
exploded, and America found itself a new bubble. Nay-sayers
were dismissed.
In this period I tried to alert my media colleagues to the
coming credit crisis in the pages of Nieman Reports , the journalism review
of Harvard’s Nieman Foundation. My concerns largely
fell on deaf ears
Even though I had many political disagreements with Peter
Schiff, the two of us, despite coming from different places, were
running into similar problems.
He told me, “I didn’t see how this thing could have gone on
for another decade. It seemed like the problem was so enormous,
that the real estate bubble was so huge, that the bad