Wimpy Media Should Say Wall Street Had A 'meltdown'
NEW YORK (MarketWatch) -- Over the past few, stunning weeks, the reporters covering the apparent collapse of capitalism have tried mightily to be prudent and proper. In this extraordinary period, however, I'd prefer bluntness and brutal truth.
This is no time for journalists to be hedging their bets and falling back on imprecise, sugar-coated language.
The Wall Street media may want to dispel notions that they're merely trying to capitalize on a scary time and sell newspapers, increase their Web clicks and raise television ratings. Remember, journalists were skewered after the tech bubble burst in 2000. The public blamed the media for acting as cheerleaders for the fragile Internet stocks.
But these days, the media are taking their good intentions too far. They're failing to describe accurately the bloodbath (and, you bet, "bloodbath" is an acceptable word, too).
So, why, then, are financial reporters tearing up their Roget's? Maybe they're trying too hard to do the right thing. Perhaps this is a form of political correctness gone amok.
Or, simply chalk it all up to wimpiness.
Playing down emotion
The issue came to a head on Sept. 21, when the New York Times ran a piece headlined: "Amid Market Turmoil Some Journalists Tone Down Emotion."
Times' reporter Richard Perez-Pena did a thorough job of interviewing leading financial media representatives. They dutifully stressed the importance of using non-inflammatory language to describe the fiasco.
Perez-Pena wrote: "For most of the country, the financial crises of the last few weeks have offered an education in economics. For journalists, they have been a lesson in semantics."
But semantics don't help readers and viewers understand the financial news. Journalists' first obligation is to tell the truth, even when the public doesn't want to hear it.
"In most of the news, stocks have 'slid' and markets 'gyrated' but not 'crashed,'" Perez-Pena reported. "Companies have 'tottered' and 'struggled' rather than moved toward failure and bankruptcy."
Give me that again? In this tumultuous period, we've seen the Treasury's $700 billion rescue plan, Lehman Brothers' bankruptcy, the takeover of Merrill Lynch , job losses numbering in the tens of thousands as well as stock market plunges representing billions of dollars in market capitalizations.
Are the media serious? Wall Street is the domestic version of Baghdad. Journalists SHOULD use powerful language to describe the red ink flowing on the Street.
Newspapers, magazines, TV networks, Internet sites, blogs and radio stations run the risk of not telling readers and viewers an accurate story if they're choosing words so carefully that we're not capturing what is really going on.
A story of this magnitude deserves the media's best work. Tom Rosenstiel, the director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, said in a recent report: "The Wall Street meltdown captured more media attention than the presidential campaign last week, and the crisis re-directed the campaign narrative toward a focus on economic issues."
"We're very careful not to throw words around like 'meltdown' and 'free fall,'" Ali Velshi, senior business correspondent at CNN said in the New York Times piece. "If someone wants to say the markets are in free fall, we'll discuss it first" - and might change the wording.
By anyone standards, if this isn't a meltdown, I don't know what is.
What grade do you assign to the financial media lately? A, B, C, D or F?
"Amid Market Turmoil, Some Journalists Try to Tone Down Emotion" by Richard Perez-Pena (New York Times, Sept. 21)
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By Jon Friedman