All Is Well.. All Is Well... SURPRISE !!

The Columbia Journalism Review sums up the media's overall negligence by not bringing the looming economic trainwreck to the frontpages before Monday's freefall.

[The public] might have known, sure, about Lehman’s woes. And they may have received snippets of information about Merrill and AIG and the rest that, taken together, could have foreshadowed a bit of today’s Big Bang. They knew, generally, that the economy’s a mess right now—and that Wall Street’s follies are partially to blame.

But that today would be Black Monday? That those discrete “warning signs,” such as they were, would suddenly merge and morph into a “full-blown crisis”? Not so much.

And that, I’d argue, is in part the fault of the press. And, specifically, it’s the fault of the atomized structuring of financial reporting, which keeps Wall Street insiders excessively informed about the market’s most minor whims … and outsiders (read: everyone else) essentially uninformed until, as today, catastrophe befalls the market. In which case, the outsiders are suddenly and unceremoniously brought into the circle of information with doomsday-esque headlines like “FINANCIAL CRISIS” (NYT) and “Markets Tumble…” (AP) and “Market Plunges…” (LA Times) and “BLACK MONDAY: World Stocks Sink” (Huffington Post) and the like on the front pages of the news outlets of record.

Compare the WSJ’s and the FT’s and Bloomberg’s and the business pages’ treatment of the current crisis, in the days and weeks leading up to it, to the straight news pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post and the like. Rather than focus, in those days and weeks, on the incidents that led to today’s plunge, general-interest news outlets focused fairly myopically on … the presidential campaign. And, within that, Sarah Palin (“qualifications to be Vice President of,” “governorship of,” “family of,” “fashion sense of,” “recreational habits of,” “porcine allusions to,” etc.). Indeed, in the coverage of the presidential campaign, Palin and Palin-Related Minutiae comprised a whopping 60 percent of last week’s campaign coverage, according to the Project for Excellence in Journalism.

The financial crisis, either current or looming? Didn’t even make the cut.

That crisis is very tangibly a campaign issue; but it was virtually ignored as such in general-interest reportage, and got very little coverage outside of the business-press niche. Which led, last week, to a populace of news consumers aware that Todd Palin is a champion snowboarder and that his seventeen-year-old daughter will marry the father of her unborn baby…but not that the national credit crisis would, this weekend, be reaching (what we can only hope is) its nadir.