Sunday, on Meet the Press, David Gregory and an “economic and political roundtable”, which consisted of The Week’s David Frum, BBC’s Katty Kay, CNBC’s Steve Liesman, and PBS’s Tavis Smiley, brought up the interview between Stewart and Cramer on Thursday night.
GREGORY: …And, Steve, I want to first pose this question to you. A nerve was touched this week. Jon Stewart on the "The Daily Show" raised some really tough questions for CNBC and other financial journalists about who was out there before this crisis came upon us to, to sound the alarm and say what was happening in our financial industry was fundamentally unsound? And so it goes to a question, I guess, Steve, of who can you point to in financial journalism who, you know, would get the award for sounding the alarm and saying, "Hey, wait a minute, guys, there's something we really ought to be paying attention to here"?
MR. LIESMAN: Well, first of all, that nerve was right back here, right in the back of my neck.MR. GREGORY: Yeah.
MR. LIESMAN: Which is the one that was touched. Look, I, I can't--see, there's a spokesman for a CNBC. That's not my job. I'm not management, I'm a reporter on the staff.
MR. GREGORY: And this is broader--this is not just about CNBC.
MR. LIESMAN: And it's...
MR. GREGORY: It's about financial journalism.
MR. LIESMAN: I've been reporting on the subprime crisis since 2006. I was--I did investigative work in 2007 that said the subprime crisis, despite what the Treasury secretary and the Federal Reserve chairman were saying, was going to spread beyond that. I think there's a lot of reporters at CNBC who've done a lot of work on that. I was a finalist for the Emmys when it came to that and my reporting in 2006, 2007. There are reporters at the Wall Street Journal, The New York Times all who have done great work on the subprime crisis.
Could we have screamed louder? Almost certainly. Were--did we explain enough what was going on? Probably not. But we were out there, we were doing it. The fact that they didn't notice is not my problem.
MR. FRUM: It was...
MS. KAY: I think part of the reason this is being--caught such fire in the American public this week is that we saw this in 2003 with the run-up to the war in Iraq.
MR. GREGORY: Mm-hmm.
MS. KAY: Where there was a failure of political journalists to ask the tough questions of the administration, as we went into Iraq, about weapons of mass destruction. President Bush was not hauled over the coals in the way that, for example, Tony Blair was back in Britain. But in this case it's even more complicated, because we rely on financial journalists. Most of us, and the American public in general, this is very complicated stuff. We don't have the jargon, we don't have the technical expertise, so we have to have the financial journalists acting as the people that...(unintelligible)...power.
MR. GREGORY: …I want to stay on this question of accountability with regard to the financial press generally and what could have been done. Because what's left out of this conversation is average Americans who were taking the money, who thought, you know, on a salary of $40,000, $50,000...
MR. FRUM: Yeah. Right.
MR. GREGORY: ...they could afford a $400,000 mortgage. So it was all around. What should have been done or said, and at what point?
MR. FRUM: The administration that was in power at the time, Bush administration, which I served, had a problem through those years, which was there was not a lot of good economic news that affected the ordinary person. Incomes were flat, you could see the debt levels rising. There was one, there was one story, however, that you could tell that was a positive story, and that was the increase in the assets held by the average family because of the housing bubble. And nobody wanted to get in the way of that. Not, not the administration, not Congress. Because if, if they did, what other good news would there be? And it's true that the financial press has tabloidized itself. And the multiplication of cable channels has meant that we, we talk about the news in a less serious way in all kinds of ways.
MR. GREGORY: And we have The Washington Post now folding its business section into the front page, so we have less financial journalism.
…MS. KAY: But the main issues are, are...
MR. GREGORY: Quickly here, and then I want to get into something else.
MS. KAY: ...that journalists are there to ask tough questions, whether is it...
MR. SMILEY: Exactly.
MS. KAY: ...the president who's in office or whether it's the businesses that they're talking to everyday who are their sources. And I think that's what happened. We--what are we here for? What are we paid for as journalists? We're paid to ask the tough question and then to ask the follow-up question if we don't feel we got the answer.
MR. GREGORY: Steve, final question of the--was what was wrong in the financial system, was it knowable, was it discoverable?
MR. LIESMAN: Yes, it was. It was way too much excess. Here's, here's the, here's the easy thing you could have known: Any time capital chases investments, you know you're in for a hard fall. It should be investment ideas that are looking for money. That's the normal way of the world. This was all backwards, it was the other way around, and that was how you could have known we were headed for a hard fall.
Much can be taken from the roundtable talk about Stewart and the state of financial journalism. A few questions come to my mind.
Why is it that the BBC journalist seems to understand the state of financial journalism better than the other members of the roundtable?
Why do members of the press who critique the media (in this case, David Gregory) focus on quantity rather than quality when addressing the state of financial journalism?
And, how come Liesman is allowed to diagnose why the economy is the way it is right now and not be held accountable for being silent at CNBC when the collapse was occurring?
I know, I know. Liesman said he covered the subprime crisis. But, what about the subprime crisis was he covering?
A LexisNexis search for “Steve Liesman” in the News Transcripts category does not yield much truth telling. In fact, what one can gather is that Liesman (as well as others) were like the journalists embedded with U.S. soldiers in Iraq: They were concerned about access and less concerned about the questions & answers in the interviews with officials whom they had gained access to.
This news story on CNBC boasts about the fact that Liesman can get interviews with "Fed officials."
Liesman himself is bringing us an important Fed moment this week. On Friday, Liesman interviews Chicago Fed President Michael Moskow on "Squawk Box." This marks Liesman's 13th exclusive on-camera interview with a Fed official. You may recall the market-moving interview Liesman had last month with Richmond Fed President Jeffrey Lacker, who said he didn't see inflation coming down.
Interestingly, Liesman raised the topic of nationalizing U.S. banks in February. This might have led to some truth digging. Unfortunately, Liesman let the idea of nationalizing U.S. banks rest after Brian Williams passively and nonchalantly reacted to Liesman’s remarks (which can be heard in this video).
Blame the Little Guy Who Mortgage Companies Tried to Make Quick Bucks Off Of
For the most part, the crew over at CNBC (and much of the press) has focused on the subprime mortgage aspect of the current financial apocalypse. The analysis provided points the finger all too often at the citizens who purchased loans or mortgages and were unable to afford them and knew they would not be able to pay for them.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
1
1
1
