Market Media Meltdown

If the National Weather Service issued a warning about a tsunami nearing our shores, here's what you'd see on your TV screen: news centers turned into "storm centers," with fancy graphics and Doppler radars tracking the likely "strike zone," and brave reporters in rain gear hugging the coastline, heightening alarm about the disaster to come.

Yet when a calamity struck last summer--a financial tsunami, tied to the implosion of the subprime mortgage market--most media were asleep at the switch. True, there were reports about the market meltdown, but the crisis sparked little breaking-news excitement, and the presidential candidates didn't touch the subject of a financial crisis for months.

The mystery deepens when you realize how much attention our media give to business news. After all, there are three twenty-four-hour cable stations--CNBC, Fox Business and Bloomberg TV--monitoring every blip in the indices. Thomson Reuters and AP now compete with Murdoch's Dow Jones to get the news to us first. PBS has its Nightly Business Report, and NPR does Marketplace. There are endless magazines and corporate news websites. All the networks have their experts, and every newspaper has a business section.

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