� ���"I think the media mostly did unpaid press releases for various businesses looking to sale financial products and while that made sense given the advertising driven the media, they became cheerleaders instead of critics and that took of the table out of the discussion a critical voice that would have help people realize what was going on, stop it before it got too big and deal with the crisis in a way that was relatively transparent, democratic and broadly beneficial as opposed to quite and partial and very muddy and unclear.
I pressed him to reflect on why, � ���"It seems like there is still a tendency to amplify rumors on one hand, and then try to reassure that everything is ok while at the same time tell us that the world is about to end"� �� �
� ���"Well we get a wild volatility, with a blind set of stories, everything is fine, nothing to see here, remain calm or if you don't do x,y and z or tomorrow life as we know will come to a stretching hold, water won't come out of your faucet, electricity won't come on, and you will live the rest of your life regretting that you just didn't listen to me when I told you what I wanted. And that is a bad way conduct a social discussion. And it makes the public more scared and quite reasonably less confident in leadership whether that is corporative leadership, politicians or the media itself.� �� �
The tendency on the left is to bash the frenzy of free market hype on Fox but not look to carefully at other channels and mainstream media outlets.
Often, even when they run good stories, they don't probe deeply enough. The Naked Capitalism blog offered up one recent example in the New York Times:
� ���"The New York Times features a generally very good piece, � ���"Buyout Firms Profited as a Company's Debt Soared,� �� � by Julie Creswell that falls short in one important respect: it fails to call a prevalent and destructive practice of private equity firms by its proper name".
George Akerlof and Paul Romer called that activity looting in a famous 1993 paper and depicted it as criminal: � �� �Bankruptcy for profit will occur if poor accounting, lax regulation, or low penalties for abuse give owners an incentive to pay themselves more than their firms are worth and then default on their debt obligations".� �� �
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"� �� �
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