“financial journalists fail upward”
I am reading an article from naked capitalism-an original post from The Huffington Post. This article echoes Jon Steward’s recent criticisms of CNBC superstar Jim Cramer and the entire network for acting like market cheerleaders rather than financial journalists. Thomas Frank, a Wall Street journal columnist, argues that financial journalism was an upward failure.
The reasons the financial-entertainment biz failed us are many and complex, but they ultimately come down to this: In the marketplace to describe the marketplace itself, there is precious little competition. There is a single, standard product that comes in packaging that is alternately sultry, energetic or fun — bitter, brainy or Cramer “crazy” — but which rarely strays beyond certain ideological boundaries. Adversarial voices are few. Criticism is sacrificed for access. Advice sometimes shades over into simple propaganda. Even the worst prognosticators sometimes go on to jobs with presidential campaigns or prominent think tanks.
Whether the experts at the TV’s No.1 financial news network knew what was going on behind the scenes on Wall Street and could have warned the public of the meltdown coming is debatable, but nobody can deny that they abandoned their journalistic duties and acted more like market cheerleaders. CNBC superstar Jim Cramer was very clever at downplaying his role on The Daily Show. By downplaying his role, he can absolve himself of any responsibility for the meltdown.
We know — or we think we know — about the roles played by other culprits in the debacle. The government regulators, for example: How could they have ignored the coming disaster? Well, they were incapacitated by decades of deregulation. What about the market’s own watchdogs? Well, from appraisers to ratings agencies the whole tough-minded system was apparently undermined by conflicts of interest. But what about the syndicated columnists and the beloved stock pickers and the authors of personal finance best-sellers, the industry for which CNBC is the perfect symbol? How did they manage to miss the volcano under their feet?
A former CNBC anchor said, “ they didn’t uncover the lies that were told to them. Nobody did. But they should be held to a higher responsibility.” Jon Steward’s criticisms of CNBC are not out of line as some would have us believed. Before the bust, it paid off being market cheerleaders than financial journalists. Clueless pundits and those who abandoned their journalistic duties were getting to the top while the few adversarial voices who saw the meltdown coming were being excluded and even ridiculed.
But the larger problem won’t go away. And it’s not just a matter of people missing the biggest economic story of the last 20 years. It’s a matter of those who minimized it and those who blew it off because it didn’t fit their worldview continuing in their plum positions of authority. Mr. Stewart wasn’t rude enough to ask it, but over all his inquiries there hung the obvious question: Why do you still have a job, Mr. Cramer?
Franks seems to have answered his own question, “if the world of financial infotainment can itself be described as a “market,” it is a market where accountability does not seem to exist, where the heaviest of incentives seems to carry no weight, and where consumers, to judge by what they get, seem constantly to choose the lousy over the good. The old order discredits itself, but the old order persists nevertheless.” Whatever happens next, Steward’s criticisms certainly raised serious question about the experts at TV’s No.1 financial news network.
April 1st, 2009 at 9:44 am
whats interesting to think about is who is relying on these shows as a source of information – where info has turned into a commodity and into entertainment and pure ideology – and who (big players) knows where to find ‘real’ information…. i wonder if there is a two tier system thats worth considering – and then asking who has access to that ‘other’ tier…. or do you think even the big players were delusional?
April 16th, 2009 at 9:12 pm
To quote Thomas Frank “the small investors whom the personal-financial industry claims so much to adore remain bystanders in a drama they neither understand nor control.”