Danny Schechter - ColdType

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ing and loan crisis in the 1980’s, the stock market crisis in the
1920s…” In fact, a closer look at what happened in these
events reveals substantial corporate larceny.
Months later, top journalists at the New York Times began
to intimate that criminal behavior was pervasive in the finance
world. Columnist Bob Herbert wrote in July 2009 of “malefactors”
in the financial industry, “The people running this system
remind me of gangsters who manage to walk out of the courthouse
with a suspended sentence, and can’t wait to get back
to their nefarious activities.”
For every journalist willing to acknowledge pervasive criminality,
others obscure the issue, as in a CNN Money article
that asks, “Who caused the financial crisis, villains or jerks.”
You can’t be both?
The article scoffs at the tone of a story by writer Matt Taibbi,
excoriating the investment firm Goldman Sachs in Rolling
Stone magazine as a “great vampire squid wrapped around the
face of humanity.” Then it reinforces a characterization of an
AIG executive described as an “egotistical jerk” as opposed
to being a “diabolical mastermind,” and in the words of the
author “as trapped as anyone else in the bubble he helped create.
“Though Taibbi may find it hard to believe, that’s how it
usually is,” this lecture concluded as if it is naïve to think that
big institutions would flout the law in their own interests.
There big media goes again: everyone gets turned into a
victim, even the victimizers. Walter Cronkite’s famous dicta
“that’s the way it is” has become “that’s how it usually is,”
with no clarity on what “usually” is supposed to mean.
Some top journalists recognized pervasive criminal activity
but few admitted, as did Gillian Tett of the Financial Times,
their own ambivalences on punishing wrongdoers. She wrote,
“On a personal level, I have little taste for seeing hordes of
bankers heading for jail, or facing massive fines. Nor do I have