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Conservatives like Peter Schiff who was literally laughed off Fox News when he warned of the coming meltdown in 2006--the year I did the film IN DEBT WE TRUST--says media institutions have c"entrist biases that genuflect to the status quo.
"Alot of the media I appeared on were kind of captured by the industries," he told me. "You know everybody that comes on television is working for government or working for Wall Street. They all have invested interest. They are all trapped inside the bubble and so from their advantage point they don't know they are in a bubble""
Right now, many media outlets are reinforcing the idea that a recovery is underway pointing to a rise in the stock market and some glimmers of improvement, even as joblessness continues to climb along with bankruptcies and foreclosures.
The dissents of informed analysts like Paul Krugman, Nouriel Roubini and George Soros are heard but marginalized. The signs of another collapse tired to an insolvent banking sector are discussed in the financial blogs, but not yet on TV.
And the crime angle that I investigate is still seen as minor, except in all the stories about Bernie Madoff or the corporate lawyer Marc Dreier just profiled by 60 Minutes which wanted to get him to be more "emotional" (ie cry for the camera).
These "poster boys" for corporate crime get the visibility while reports on pervasive "epic" fraud in our financial institutions are buried in trade outlets like Information Week which notes "Seventy percent of financial institutions in the past 12 months have had cases of insider fraud, new survey says."
"Kelly Jackson Higgins reported, "A former Wachovia Bank executive who had handled insider fraud incidents says banks are in denial about just how massive the insider threat problem is within their institutions. Meanwhile, the economic crisis appears to be exacerbating the risk, with 70 percent of financial institutions saying they have experienced a case of data theft by one of their employees in the past 12 months, according to new survey data.
"Shirley Inscoe, who spent 21 years at Wachovia handling insider fraud investigations and fraud prevention, says banks don't want to talk about the insider fraud, and many aren't aware that it's an "epic problem."
Epic problems are often buried problems. No wonder most of us don't know about them and are not as outraged as we deserve to be.
News Dissector Danny Schechter has made a film and written a book on the "Crime Of Our Time." (News Dissector.com/plunder.) Comments to dissector@mediachannel.org
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