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Credit Crisis Shocked Big Papers—but Why?

Only a few outlets warned of subprime collapse

By Drew Nelles, Newser Staff

Posted Mar 8, 2009 5:19 PM CDT

(Newser) – If the financial crisis shocked news readers—and it did—it must have surprised news writers as well, David Folkenflik reasons on NPR. He surveyed major US publications and, sure enough, found few warnings of financial doom pre-meltdown. A New York Times columnist explained it this way: "As long as the stock market is going up, people don't really pay attention to a lot of other things."

It gets worse: A former NYT editor told Folkenflik that media watchdogs were out of their depth. "We in the journalism world had a very imperfect understanding of how the financial system fit together," he said. With a few notable exceptions—like BusinessWeek and the Wall Street Journal—most business coverage “fixated on executive suite intrigue and outsize corporate personalities," writes Folkenflik.

[Images (6)]

[Quotes (2)]

Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, holds up the Wall Street Journal as he questions former CEO's of AIG in Washington, Tuesday, Oct. 7, 2008. (AP Photo/Lawrence Jackson)

Newspapers and magazines featuring coverage of the U.S. elections are seen displayed at a news stand in the center of Amsterdam, Netherlands, Wednesday Nov. 5, 2008. (AP Photo/Peter Dejong)

A copy of the US edition of The Wall Street Journal lies on a copy of The Times at the same London newsagent on April 16, 2008 in London, England. (Getty Images)

The Wall Street Journal newspaper is offered for sale along side other papers at a newsstand in the Chicago Board of Trade building July 17, 2007 in Chicago, Illinois. (Getty Images)

In this July 22, 2008 file photo, traffic passes in front of the New York Times building in New York. (AP Photo/Mark Lennihan, file)

A customer buys the New York Times in San Francisco. Most major media outlets ignored the first warning signs of the financial crisis, David Folkenflik writes. (AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)

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Maybe you don't remember what we wrote. Maybe you didn't read what we wrote. But we were out there covering this stuff. - Peter Coy, economics editor for BusinessWeek

When people said, 'We can have a subprime crisis, and subprime loans are a relatively small part of the economy...' we did not understand how the credit markets worked." - Steve Engleberg former New York Times investigative editor

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Credit Crisis Shocked Big Papers—but Why?