Financial Meltdown-where was the media?

Today’s NPR Talk of the Nation program examined whether the Financial Press missed the meltdown? David Wessel, economics director, defended the Wall Street Journal by saying it covered some of the signs–just not enough. The reason, Wessel says, that it was all so complex that everyone missed it. And the reason he gave for why they missed it is what he termed as “a failure of the imagination” (or diligence). Its not the first time we have heard the phrase “failure of the imagination”–it was also mentioned in findings of the 9/11 Commission noting not a lack of data but a failure in connecting the dots of troubling reports. When asked why we didn’t see this coming, Peter Coy economics editor for Business Week magazine, replied “If everything we had said and written came true then we might have expected some of this to have happen,” Coy said. “But I think there was a failure of imagination among economists, policymakers, as well as journalists.” Going forward, some soul searching questions will need to be answered on missed cues that have resulted in enormous consequences.
Visit NPR for the audio and article at http://bit.ly/kb7nO