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Topic: Miscellaneous items
Date/Time: 4/21/2009 2:43:05 PM
Title: FT editor's Poynter Fellowship lecture
Posted By: Jim Romenesko
 
Did financial journalists miss the financial crisis?

Lionel Barber's Poynter Fellowship lecture, Yale University

April 21, 2009

Thank you very much for that kind introduction. It is a great honour to
speak here as a Poynter fellow at Yale. Nelson Poynter’s programme has done so much over the years to illuminate the theory and practice of good journalism. Though as the legendary Yogi Berra once observed, wisely: “In theory there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is."

These are the best of times and the worst of times to be a financial
journalist. The best, because we have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to
report, analyse and comment on the most serious financial crisis since the
Great Crash of 1929. The worst, because the newspaper and television
industries are suffering, not only from the cyclical shock of a deep
recession but also from the ongoing structural shock powered by the internet revolution.

Now, out of Mr Berra’s proverbial left field, comes a third shock. The
financial media find itself accused of missing the global financial crisis.
Asleep at the wheel. Head in the clouds. Head in the sand. No cliché has
been left unturned as reporters, commentators, yes even editors, have been castigated for failing to warn an unsuspecting public of impending disaster.

Do these charges add up? Was the press an accomplice or merely an innocent bystander at the scene of the crash? To paraphrase the killer question from the Watergate hearings: What did the press know and when did it know it?

Two months ago, I found myself, along with four other senior journalists
from the press and television, answering a barrage of similar questions in front of the House of Commons Treasury Select committee at Westminster, the equivalent of the House Financial Services committee without the cerebral wit of Barney Frank.

The experience was disconcerting and more than a little disappointing.
There were no klieg lights and the quality of questioning fell short, well short, of the standards set by the Watergate committee. Among the more improbable accusations was that the financial press in Britain had deliberately buried the bad news because bad news did not sell newspapers.

This charge from a Scottish Labour MP aptly named Mudie (pronounced Moody) conveniently overlooked a decade of Labour government claims that it had abolished “boom and bust” and the British economy was in far better shape than the rest of Europe – claims which were frequently reported on the front pages of the British press, including the FT.

On this side of the pond, some of my journalistic colleagues have been more forthcoming in acknowledging sins of omission, if not commission.
Charlie Gasparino, a much-feared former investigative reporter for the Wall Street Journal-turned-TV reporter for CNBC, the financial cable news channel, is uncharacteristically contrite. "We all failed,” he told Howard Kurtz of the Washington Post, “What we didn't understand was that this was building up. We all bear responsibility to a certain extent."

Kurtz himself goes further: "The shaky house of financial cards that has come tumbling down was erected largely in public view: overextended investment banks, risky practices by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, exotic mortgage instruments that became part of a shadow banking system. But while these were conveyed in incremental stories -- and a few whistle-blowing columns -- the business press never conveyed a real sense of alarm until institutions began to collapse." /CONTINUED

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