La CJR donne un bonnet d'âne aux médias eco

La Columbia Journalism Review s'est lancée dans l'examen minutieux du traitement de la crise du subprime entre le 1er janvier 2000 et le 30 juin 2007 par les journaux suivants: The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, Bloomberg News, Financial Times, Fortune, Business Week, and Forbes. Le réquisitoire est extrêmement sévère. La critique de la "corruption institutionnelle" (leur expression) qui a atteint le financement du housing est quasiment absente des organes de presse passés en revue. A noter qu'ils ont mis en ligne avec l'article un fichier Excel avec plus de 700 articles recensés sur la période.

Voici quelques paragraphes sélectionnés:

This isn’t about identifying which journalist or economist was “prescient,” the business-press parlor game du jour. What’s important is that forthright press coverage and uncompromised regulation combined to create a virtuous cycle of reform.
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Alas, any fair reading of the record will show the business press subsequently lost its taste for predatory-lending investigations and developed a case of collective amnesia about Wall Street’s connection to subprime, rediscovering it only after the fact.

There are a number of explanations (though no excuses) for this. First and foremost, was the abdication of regulatory responsibility at the federal level. Uncompromised regulation and great journalism go hand-in-hand. But when such regulation disappears, journalistic responsibilities only increase. What is important to understand first is that this press failure did occur.
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What makes this development especially maddening is that subprime lending and Wall Street’s CDO production at this point were only just getting started. Subprime mortgages in 2002 were $200 billion, 6.9 percent of all mortgages. By 2006 they were $600 billion and 20 percent of the market. Add poorly documented “Alt-A” mortgages and the 2006 figures rise to $958 billion and 32 percent. CDO production went from next to nothing in 2000 to half a trillion in 2006.
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These are valuable stories. But to get the public involved you need more. You need stories of institutionalized corruption. There’s no way around it.

What was missing—and needed—were more stories like the one that ran on February 4, 2005 in the Los Angeles Times by Mike Hudson and Scott Reckard: “Workers Say Lender Ran ‘Boiler Rooms.’ ”
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It is disingenuous, I believe, to suggest, as many financial journalists do, that they are unfairly expected to have been soothsayers in the economic crisis (e.g. “Financial Journalism and Its Critics,” Robert Teitelman, TheDeal.com, 3/6/09: “Why, among all other journalists, are financial reporters expected to accurately predict the future?”). Rather, the expectation is merely that financial outlets do their best to report on what is happening now, including, one would hope, confronting powerful institutions directly about basic business practices. This is not complicated.
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In light of this general system failure, what are the lessons for the general reader and the business press itself? First, the public should be aware—warned, so to be speak—that its interests and those of the business press may not be in perfect alignment. :-) No Shit! J'adore...