Bad News : How America's Business Press Missed the Story of the Century

"There are three twenty-four-hour financial networks. All their slogans are like, `We know what's going on on Wall Street.' But then you turn it on during the crisis, and they're like, `We don't know what's going on.' It'd be like turning on the Weather Channel in a hurricane and they're just doing this: [shuddering] `Why am I wet?! What's happening to me? And it's so windy!'" -Jon Stewart

Bad News is the first book to probe the role of the business press before and during the financial crisis. When the markets unraveled and the U.S. economy began spiraling downward, reporters raced to cover an unfamiliar cast of characters and an alphabet soup of derivatives and toxic financial instruments. Ironically, the business of journalism itself began to cave in simultaneously, leaving the mainstream media faced with collapsing ad revenues and decreased circulation

As the business press began to receive criticism from across the political spectrum for the cheerleading coverage that helped create the financial bubble in the first place---epitomized by Jon Stewart's now-famous attack on James Cramer for his uncritical treatment of Bear Stearns and other financial giants---the media was confronted head-on with several tough questions. Did the press fail in its critical role as it gave in to the irrational exuberance that fed the bubble itself? How do we explain these failures? And could they happen again?

With contributions from leading journalists and academics at the forefront of this issue---from Nobel Laureate Joseph E. Stiglitz and the Columbia Journalism Review's Dean Starkman to Huffington Post business editor Peter S. Goodman and former Wall Street Journal reporter Maureen Tkacik---Bad News helps us navigate a controversy that will be studied for decades to come and strikes at the heart of the heated debate about the media's role as guardians of our democratic society