The Financial Press & the Meltdown

Dean Starkman's excellent article on the financial press is in the current issue of Columbia Journalism Review, not online at present. It's a detailed and relentless account and I'm sure it will engender quite a bit of controversy.

Dean found that the media "did everything but take on the institutions that brought down the financial system." To his credit, he emphasizes that this was a failure of leadership. He concludes by saying:

...never, ever underestimate the importance of editorial leadership and news ownership, for in them rests the power to push back against structural conflicts and cultural taboos fostered by industry, to clear a space for business journalism to do the job it is clearly capable of, the one job that really needed doing.

Dean does not go into specifics on this point, and I think it deserves another article.

© 2009 Gary Weiss. All rights reserved.