Bloggasm

While Republicans and Democrats engage in their own heated version of the Blame Game for who’s actually responsible for the current financial crisis, the business press has been standing in the corner, hands in pockets, avoiding eye contact. So the question is: what role did they play in not warning us of the coming disaster?

The Columbia Journalism Review:

Your beat just blew up.

From a journalistic standpoint, what we are experiencing today is the equivalent of the city hall reporter arriving for work one day to find the mayor and city council being led out in handcuffs. If the business press were, say, a nuclear industry reporter, this is having most of the reactors on your beat melting down to China. What to tell the boss?

In my opinion, the business press covers the financial industry in the same way the political press covers politics: As a horse race. They couldn’t see the coming storm because they were too fixated on how far the stock market had risen or fallen on that particular day. It was certainly surreal to listen to them months ago declaring that the world was ending one day and then act like everything was fine when the market experienced a brief bounce the next day.