Heidi N. Moore, an ex-WSJ staffer and vocal defender of the business press, has been Twittering like mad to lambaste anyone who might question the MSM’s performance covering financial institutions before the great crash of ’08, which, of course, took everyone, the financial press very much included, by surprise.
Moore argues the press did its job in warning the public with an ocean of material that critics can’t be bothered to read.
Unfortunately, we are up against lazy people who don’t read biz press daily (or at all) and fall back on dumb quasi-info as result
“Lazy people” apparently include Jay Rosen at NYU, C.W. Anderson at CUNY, and Dan Gillmor at ASU, among others.
So the offenders are mostly “journo profs”:
The only time most journo profs ever left media bubble to spare a thought for biz journalism is to attack for mythical failure.
“Dumb quasi-info” would be my “Power Problem,” a survey and analysis of the reporting by the most influential business news outlets—Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Fortune, etc.—on major lenders and their Wall Street backers between 2000 and mid-2007 (the rationale for the choice of outlets and the time period are in the story, and here is a database of some 700 stories that we deemed relevant for one reason or another.
Moore says the piece is also “nonsensical,” “useless,” and “obviously fake ‘research.’”
A debate about where the press fits into the financial crisis couldn’t come at a better time, actually, now that the narrative about the crisis is noticeably turning. At first, as things got sorted out and confusion reigned, various Wall Street-influenced ideas prevailed, namely, that the crash was some sort of natural disaster, was “everybody’s fault,” and/or is too complex to be laid at the feet of any particular institution or group of individuals.
Now, fraud is allowed as possible driver, a perspective we’ve argued for a long time the business press should explore more aggressively. Here’s our fullest statement on that from ‘08.
The new meme started, albeit faintly, when the Angelides Commission kicked off its vital work back in January, got a rocket-powered boost with the Valukas/Lehman blockbuster, and now is fully loosed upon the land with the SEC charges laid against Goldman, an example, by the way, of the business press at its best. (I said last year that Gretchen Morgenson was the most influential important financial journalist of her generation, and, with colleague Louise Story, she keeps showing us why).
But far be it from me to stay up on the high road when the low blows are raining on people who cite “Power Problem,” correctly, as an argument that the press didn’t blow the whistle on powerful financial institutions while they were still powerful.
Here is part of Moore’s attempted Tweetbeatdown (a style note: Each paragraph is a separate message from Moore tweeted “at” Rosen. I’ve taken out the screen names to make it easier for non-Twitter users to understand, and embedded the link to each tweet in its first words):
But if you READ the business press, then it DID warn you, and thoroughly, and nationwide, and early.
And my point is, if you don’t READ the business press, then it can’t WARN you. Because we do not have telepathic powers.
And then there are these, also from Moore to Rosen:
What bothers me here is that you obviously don’t follow the business press. These are prize-winning investigations.
And MORE. http://is.gd/nkmd http://is.gd/nkne http://is.gd/6wqV
READ MORE: @moorehn: http://bit.ly/9TQ4pI And more: http://bit.ly/cK9EqE http://nyti.ms/cbEqfT http://bit.ly/cyIVgS
READ PLEASE. http://bit.ly/ayVA0e http://bit.ly/bBzhTM http://bit.ly/ba1HlX http://bit.ly/a0YvGw http://bit.ly/bajVXv
Sorry, that is lazy. 1) You’re relying on another’s work 2) I gave 15 examples of examples of award-winning subprime coverage
And yet I’m the one who has offered proof instead of calling people names. So, sorry, Jay, but you’re punking out. Weak.
I am severely disappointed in CJR and Dean Starkman for this gross mischaracterization of both the Twitter debate yesterday and for my own views. I would have hoped that Starkman, an ex-WSJ staffer himself, would have taken the time to bolster his point or defend his article rather than try to harangue me out of a well-researched opinion. Why not defend his conclusion rather than launch ad hominem attacks and spend his time quoting my Twitter account? Because, as I noted in my tweets, and as I will respond in an article later this week, Dean Starkman's argument itself is weak.
In the article - which, indeed you should buy - Starkman conveniently cherry-picks articles to get to the incorrect conclusion that the business press had somehow missed the crisis. But in fact, Starkman's own article includes at least 30 examples of journalists doing deep investigative work on subprime, both in the 2000 to 2003 timeframe he credits AND in the 2004 to 2007 timeframe he doesn't.
How does he do this? Simple. By redefining, in the middle of the article, what constitutes warning and muckracking. Starkman says that the business press is for "us," meaning the consumer. Then he criticizes the business press for all of its considerable warnings between 2004 and 2007 because he calls it a "downshift" to servicey and consumer pieces. He also dismissses any articles not in his chosen group of the NYT, WSJ, BW -- the so-called "national press" - which is obviously a major flaw in his methodology. Not all of the business journalists in the world work at that handful of outlets. The Boston Globe, CS Monitor and others did excellent work of joining in on the media drumbeat of warning about crooked lenders and home prices.
But even if all the journalists in the world DID work at that randomly selected group of publications that Starkman calls "the national press," they did a damn fine job of covering the subprime crisis. Do a search in the NY Times or WSJ archives for "Fannie Mae" or "Freddie Mac" or "subprime" and you will find a decade's worth of regular coverage that is always critical. BusinessWeek did particularly impressive work, quoted extensively in Starkman's article but dismissed.
Instead, to tune out all the examples of subprime warnings in the business press AND cited in his own very article, and to keep pounding his flawed thesis, Starkman claims that the only kind of article that mattered was "muckraking about a single company, the most useful and fun to read." This is not only as an arbitrary way to define warnings, but also woefully misguided and insulting. The business press churned out tons of articles about the dangers of an entire industry, how MANY subprime lenders and banks all held the same agenda and were preying on consumers. They did this not just in the mythical 2000 to 2003 timeframe, but ALSO in the 2004 to 2007 timeframe, Starkman cites them in his text. He just doesn't think that stories about the failures of an entire industry and active warnings to consumers are "as fun to read" as a day looking over the shoulder of a mortgage broker.
Obviously, that's wrong and shortsighted. But even if that kind of story was omitted from coverage, that's one kind of story, and Starkman has to perform intellectual Twister to somehow claim that is the ONLY kind of story that would have served as a warning. Wrong again.
The funny thing is that Starkman's own story is not as crudely indicting as the journalism professors who (abusively) defended it. He did do the work to look up these articles, but unfortunately may have been the victim of "biased assimilation" - having come up with an incorrect thesis, he had to twist the data to defend it.
Another twist of the data: In the middle of the article, Starkman redefines journalism with an impact as needing to create government reform. This is a particularly insulting point to the business press, which is already doing a lot of t
#1 Posted by Heidi N. Moore, CJR on Mon 19 Apr 2010 at 08:16 PM
As a prime example of how Starkman cherry-picks information to support his point: of course, he doesn't quote the haranguing, insulting tweets of any of the journalism profs who insisted (even against links and the evidence presented in Starkman's own article) that the business press wasn't there. These professors were incredibly insulting and obviously bent not on proving their point, but on beating into submission anyone who didn't agree with their pre-formed prejudices.
As one tweeter (@JPFreire) pointed out to me in a sample comment, " Oh I wouldn't worry. @JayRosen_NYU calls everyone with whom he disagrees various epithets. It's just how he rolls." So Starkman has reason to pause at the kind of defenders he's attracting.
As a personal observation: I had really hoped for a more civil and fact-based debate from all involved rather than falling back on the cult of personality that is so prevalent in current media scholarship. Not one of those journalism professors did their own fact-checking on Starkman's work or questioned any of his premises; they were so dazzled by the idea of a "study" that their critical thinking shut down right there. They dismissed excellent work like this (http://www.ajr.org/article.asp?id=4668) that fought their point.
One of the mercies of financial journalism is that the financial world is based, as Michael Lewis said, on a series of arguments. People have to back up what they say with evidence. I was a student journalist at Columbia as an undergrad and, all told, have worked in journalism - finance and otherwise- 14 years. This is the first time I've waded into this narrow-minded, cultish side of the business. As Socrates said, "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?" Who guards the guardians? He meant it about government but it also applies to journalists, particularly those that are self-appointed watchdogs of journalism.
What this world needs is a snopes.com for media pundits.Too many half-baked theories, faulty analysis and revisionist history make it into the realm of oft-repeated, unquestioned Internet memes. I expected more from my industry.
#2 Posted by Heidi N. Moore, CJR on Mon 19 Apr 2010 at 09:04 PM
How do I apply for a refund of the two minutes of life I just squandered reading this post? Lots of business journalists reported about the coming financial crisis for years in the 2000s, and if a bunch of journalism professors living in their echo chambers missed it, that's their problem.
This debate has no purpose. Please end it. Too many of the rest of the business journalists are out there trying to break news, not talk about it.
#3 Posted by Joey, CJR on Mon 19 Apr 2010 at 10:05 PM
It's not surprising that Heidi N. Moore-- after spending a good two days unloading a massive quantity of 140 character venemous screeds at "ignorant, abusive, bubble-dwelling eggheads like myself"-- has ended the debate by blocking those on Twitter who have the temerity to disagree with her and depositing these comments (sadly longer than 140 characters) here. Given the fact that I've been mentioned, by name, multiple times over the course of this debate, I feel like I have to continue to respond.
First, a point of clarification. I never once told Ms. Moore "It must be terrible to realize you suck." Indeed, the manner in which Ms. Moore selectively drops "d's" at the end of words and eliminates the context of messages may sadly reinforce the public's skepticism about journalists' tendency to selectively edit quotes to suit the point they are trying to make. My entire message read: "see @moorehn, @anal_yst, other water-carrying Wall St. 'journalists' are having Iraq War 2003 moment. Its hard when you realize you sucked." The fact that the message was addressed to multiple journalistic recipients, and used the past tense, should make it clear that I was referring to the business reporting community in general, not to Ms. Moore in particular, and referring to their past, pre-meltdown coverage, not to the current debate. That said, I probably should not have used the term "sucked" to refer to business journalism reporting in the 2000-2007 era, and so for that I apologize.
For me, the central point of Dean Starkman's study can be summed up in the following paragraphs from Power Problem:
"Right now, the business press, which firmly believes it did all it could do, is in something of a standoff with those who believe that cannot be true. The discussion so far has been conducted largely at a schoolyard level: "You missed it!" "Did not." We also see a lot of defensiveness among business journalists, as though somehow individual reporters are to blame. This is preposterous. These are institutional questions. Senior editorial leaders and news executives are in the dock here, as is an entire media subculture. Leaders had the power; they set the tone; they set the frames, not this reporter or that one.
Major news outlets so far have not trained their resources on the question, a drive-by or two by Howard Kurtz notwithstanding. The American Journalism Review, quoted above, did take a look and found in the business press's favor. With all due respect to our cousins in Maryland, I find AJR's approach — in effect, sticking a thumb into several years of coverage and pulling out some plums — inadequate. Of course somebody did something. And a few did a lot of things. But did the coverage even come close to reflecting the radical transformation of the mortgage industry and Wall Street in 2004, 2005, and 2006?
What I loved about Power Problem, when it came out, was that it basically adopted long-standing methods of academic press analysis to the more everyday media analysis beat. More often than not, most media criticism (like the mentione AJR piece) simply pulls out random stories or headlines in order to make a point. But what CJR did is a variety of what's called "content analysis." You can learn about it here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_analysis
In content analysis, you basically do the following:
1. Define the question you are going to ask
2. Delimit the and justify parameters of your study, and make an argument as to why those parameters are the best ones for answering your question. Will you be looking at every newspaper ever printed between 2000 and 2007? The major metro dailies? The business press? How do you define what those are? Ultimately, all analysis involves making choices, and those choices involved trade-offs. When you write your conclusions, you should keep your limitations in min
#4 Posted by C.W. Anderson, CJR on Tue 20 Apr 2010 at 01:10 PM
>>What I do read all day are peer-reviewed academic articles that represent the "best" in scholarship on the media (the fact that this is not true, or rather that its more complicated, is a subject for another day).
See my previous comment about living in an echo chamber. Bob Dole once said that when you start talking about the politics of politics, you lose the people. Well, when journalists start talking about the media, you lose readers. Outta here.
#5 Posted by Joey, CJR on Tue 20 Apr 2010 at 02:36 PM
I see that C.W. Anderson is up to his old ways of mispresenation. Who ever uttered the words "ignorant egg-headed bubble-dweller"? Not I, in public or in private. If that's a quote, you would do well to attribute it to the person who created it, instead of passing it off as mine.
As for blocking him, yes, I did. He, Jay Rosen, Dan Gillmor about about 10 others launched dozens of tweets at me over the course of 6 hours one day, and continued it into the next. They repeated their arguments over and over, paid no mind to any refuation, and in place of debate engaged in ad hominem attacks, harassment and badgering. I told them it was enough, and CW Anderson CONTINUED to send me dozens of unsolicited tweets. It's obnoxious behavior, it was cluttering up my tweetstream, and it was a futile waste of time. Clearly the collective strategy here was to kill the messenger - because I had the temerity to point out that Starkman's CJR article (the ONLY leg of their argument by the way) was flawed and misleading, their strategy was to try to intimidate me and yell over Twitter until I just shut up and went away or joined the cult.
The tweets I sent out in reply were a *fraction* of those I received during this idiotic "debased Twitter slag-fest," which is the first accurate thing CW has written in this whole thing.
As for the arguments above to defend his behavior, they are not only condescending (which I would expect, because whatever the elitism of the business press, the self-congratulation of the journalism academy far outpaces it) but absolutely mind-blowing to hear a journalist pronounce. If I follow correctly, CW Anderson is admitting that he doesn't follow the business press, and as such has no expertise or experience to back up his argument- but it's okay because, he explains, his job as a journalism professor is to rely on studies.
Is this the state of the journalism academy? To paraphrase Linda Evangelista, "We don't get out of bed for less than 10,000 studies a day"?
Imagine, if you will, any journalist who said that their job is not to get at the truth, but to wait until someone writes a study on it. That journalist would get fired for being too lazy to undertand and analyze his own subject matter. If he's a journalism professor, however, CW Anderson tells us such behavior is not only okay, but desirable. This is sophistry of a high order indeed.
So, having dispensed with this pesky requirement of "knowledge of the subject matter at hand," CW then insists that he will only believe the CJR study is wrong if someone writes ANOTHER article (with a study, please! we only believe studies!) showing that the business press DID do its job. Utterly ridiculous, isn't it?
The inconvenient fact that just such an article exists (the excellent AJR piece that is getting unfairly and inaccurately slammed for no plausible reason) is dismissed because it is "cherry-picking." This is like calling journalism awards "cherry-picking." The AJR article mentioned the best of the genre, the pieces with the most impact, and highlighted their excellence. That is not cherry-picking. That is fair recognition, and it deserves respect.
But even if CW Anderson and others ignore the AJR piece (because they admit are experientially unable to evaluate the underlying claims, and furthermore decline to commit to reading the business press in the future, remember), there is sufficient evidence in Starkman's own piece of the excellent work of the business press in recognizing and alerting consumers to - yes! - the structural changes in the mortgage industry. Of course, to know that would involve reading the articles that Starkman cites.
I am not going to re-summarize Starkman's article (please buy it) but if you strip out the actual articles he mentions, they include MASSES of important articles written by the national business press between 2004 and 2007. The problem is that St
#6 Posted by Heidi N. Moore, CJR on Tue 20 Apr 2010 at 03:02 PM
I read all the comments and twitter postings - I am pretty shocked -
Listen, it is asinine to believe that the biz press was asleep at the wheel - Heidi pointed out articles that showed those warnings and Starkman even mentioned a few in his report. The press could have run "bubble" all day and all night on the front page and nothing would have changed.
Pundits and historians tend to forget that the investing public will listen to no one when worked up in a frenzy - and there was a frenzy - "Buy a house now before prices go up" or "buy a house and flip it - get rich quick"
How the hell was the biz press going to burst that bubble on its own?
For example, in a breakingviews piece I wrote in 07 in the WSJ, I listed the 10 reasons why oil prices were overvalued.
So what was the outcome of writing this article and putting my reputation on the line? Nothing, nada, squat - oil prices continued to go up until the frenzy died down. There was nothing I could do. My article was soon compost - gone into oblivion, buried underneath the noise.
Long story short: There was a lot of press that substantiated the housing boom and the oil boom – yes, there are journalists that got it wrong but there were some who got it right.
Heidi is trying to say that there were some who got it right and the public was warned.
My point is that it doesn’t matter: The public will trust emotion over fact almost all the time.
Depressing...
Now y'all tweet and make up!
#7 Posted by Cyrus Sanati, CJR on Tue 20 Apr 2010 at 06:48 PM
FWIW, here's how the twiiter exchange started:
http://twitter.com/jayrosen_nyu/status/12303630776
Our business press my yet turn one its worst defeats, the mortgage meltdown, into an after-the-fact investigative win. http://jr.ly/ynwp
http://twitter.com/moorehn/status/12303895114
OR 'defeat' called early and wrong. RT @MediaFixBlog RT @jayrosen_nyu Biz press may turn defeat, mtg meltdown, into win. http://jr.ly/ynwp
#8 Posted by Tim, CJR on Tue 20 Apr 2010 at 10:02 PM