INTRODUCTION: ACCESS AND ACCOUNTABILITY
1. Daily Show, “Exclusive—Jim Cramer Extended Interview: Part 2,” March 12, 2009.
2. Chris Roush, “Unheeded Warnings,” American Journalism Review, February 15, 2009.
3. Kimberly L. Allers, “A New Banking Model,” Fortune (March 2003); Mara Der Hovanesian, “Rewiring Chuck Prince,” Businessweek, no. 3972 (2006); Neil Weinberg, “Sachs Appeal,” Forbes 179, no. 2 (2007); Marcia Vickers and Doris Burke, “The Unlikely Revolutionary,” Fortune 153, no. 4 (2006).
4. Bernard Condon, “Home Wrecker,” Forbes 170, no. 4 (2002).
5. John Hechinger, “Best Interests: How Big Lenders Sell a Pricier Refinancing to Poor Homeowners,” Wall Street Journal, December 7, 2001.
6. Michael Hudson, “Banking on Misery: Citigroup, Wall Street, and the Fleecing of the South,” Southern Exposure 31, no. 2 (2003).
7. Later printed in Richard Lord, American Nightmare: Predatory Lending and the Foreclosure of the American Dream (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage, 2005), 34.
8. Theodore Roosevelt, “The Man with the Muck-Rake,” Outlook (April 1906).
9. Michael Wolff, “Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal Formula for News Corp Renaissance,” Guardian, January 7, 2013.
11. Lincoln Steffens, “The Shame of Minneapolis” (1903), in The Muckrakers, ed. Arthur Weinberg and Lila Weinberg (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1964); George Getschow, “Dirty Work: The Day Laborer’s Toil Is Hard, Pay Minimal, Security Nonexistent; in Houston, the Jobless Fill Labor Pools That Retake Part of Each Day’s Wage; the System at Crash Cabin,” Wall Street Journal, June 22, 1983; Susan Faludi, “The Reckoning: The Safeway LBO Yielded Vast Profits but Exacted a Heavy Human Toll,” Wall Street Journal, May 16, 1990; a 1978 Philadelphia Inquirer series on the police department of its home city; Gretchen Morgenson, “Behind Biggest Insurer’s Crisis, a Blind Eye to a Web of Risk,” New York Times, September 28, 2008; Nick Davies and Amelia Hill, “Missing Milly Dowler’s Voicemail Was Hacked by News of the World,” Guardian, July 4, 2011.
12. Walter Lippmann, Liberty and the News (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2008), 65.
1. IDA TARBELL, MUCKRAKING, AND THE RISE OF ACCOUNTABILITY REPORTING
1. Steve Weinberg, Taking on the Trust: The Epic Battle of Ida Tarbell and John D. Rockefeller (New York: Norton, 2008), 172; Ron Chernow, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (New York: Random House, 1998), 437–38.
3. Weinberg, Taking on the Trust, 171.
4. Peter Lyon, Success Story: The Life and Times of S. S. Mcclure (New York: Scribner, 1963), 199.
5. Ida M. Tarbell, All in the Day’s Work: An Autobiography (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 202.
6. Lyon, Success Story, 191.
7. Cecelia Tichi, Exposés and Excess: Muckraking in America, 1900/2000 (State College: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 2.
8. Weinberg and Weinberg, The Muckrakers, 73; attributed to David Graham Phillips as author of “Treason of the Senate,” a portion of a chapter in the Weinbergs’ book.
9. Lyon, Success Story, 11.
10. Harold S. Wilson, Mcclure’s Magazine and the Muckrakers (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1970), 17.
11. Wilson, Mcclure’s Magazine and the Muckrakers, 20.
12. Louis Filler, The Muckrakers (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993), 32.
13. Wilson, Mcclure’s Magazine and the Muckrakers, 285.
14. Tarbell, All in the Day’s Work, 36.
15. Richard Hofstadter, The Age of Reform: From Bryan to F.D.R (New York: Knopf, 1965), 193.
16. Wilson, Mcclure’s Magazine and the Muckrakers, 195, 196.
17. Hofstadter, The Age of Reform, 197.
18. Kathleen Brady, Ida Tarbell: Portrait of a Muckraker (New York: Seaview/Putnam, 1984), 122.
19. Wilson, Mcclure’s Magazine and the Muckrakers, 132.
21. Hofstadter, The Age of Reform, 214.
22. Hofstadter, The Age of Reform, 231.
23. Hofstadter, The Age of Reform, 235.
25. Chernow, Titan, xiii.
28. Tarbell, All in the Day’s Work, 208.
29. Tarbell, All in the Day’s Work, 209.
30. Ida M. Tarbell, The History of the Standard Oil Company, Illustrated with Portraits, Pictures, and Diagrams (New York: Macmillan, 1925), 1:65.
31. Tarbell, All in the Day’s Work, 211–13.
32. Brady, Ida Tarbell, 132.
33. Theodore Roosevelt, “The Man with the Muck-Rake,” Outlook (April 1906). Also see Weinberg and Weinberg, The Muckrakers, 58.
34. Tichi, Exposés and Excess, 3.
35. Lincoln Steffens, Autobiography (New York: The Literary Guild, 1931), 581; cited in Judson A. Grenier, “Muckraking and Muckrakers: An Historical Definition,” Journalism Quarterly (Autumn 1960): 553.
36. Justin Kaplan, Lincoln Steffens: A Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1974), 153, 150.
37. Tarbell, All in the Day’s Work, 242.
38. Tarbell, All in the Day’s Work, 226.
39. Tarbell, All in the Day’s Work, 298.
40. S. S. McClure, “Concerning Three Articles in This Number of McClure’s, and a Coincidence That May Set Us Thinking,” McClure’s (January 1903); quoted in Weinberg and Weinberg, The Muckrakers, 4–5
41. Tarbell, The History of the Standard Oil Company, 2:38.
42. Brady, Ida Tarbell, 137.
43. Hofstadter, The Age of Reform, 186.
44. Quoted in Chernow, Titan, 443–44.
45. Quoted in James Aucoin, The Evolution of American Investigative Journalism (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005), 88.
47. Tarbell, The History of the Standard Oil Company, 2:126.
48. Tarbell, All in the Day’s Work, 230.
50. Dr. Paul Giddens, quoted in Brady, Ida Tarbell, 160.
2. ACCESS AND MESSENGER BOYS: THE ROOTS OF BUSINESS NEWS AND THE BIRTH OF THE WALL STREET JOURNAL
1. Lloyd Wendt, The Wall Street Journal: The Story of Dow Jones and the Nation’s Business Newspaper (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1982), 36.
2. Jerry M. Rosenberg, Inside the Wall Street Journal: The History and the Power of Dow Jones & Company and America’s Most Influential Newspaper (New York: Macmillan, 1982), 8.
3. Stieg Larsson, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, trans. Reg Keeland (New York: Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 2009), 70.
4. Wendt, The Wall Street Journal, 36.
5. Wayne Parsons, The Power of the Financial Press: Journalism and Economic Opinion in Britain and America (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1990), 11.
6. Robert J. Shiller, Irrational Exuberance, 2nd ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 71.
7. Parsons, The Power of the Financial Press, 15.
8. Parsons, The Power of the Financial Press, 41.
9. Parsons, The Power of the Financial Press, 3.
10. Douglas W. Steeples, Advocate for American Enterprise: William Buck Dana and the Commercial and Financial Chronicle, 1865–1910 (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 2002), xxii.
11. Peter Thompson, “Journalists, Traders, and the Crisis,” paper presented at Soothsayers of Doom: The Media and the Financial Crisis in Comparative and Historical Perspective, City University London, London, December 13, 2011.
12. Richard White, Railroaded: The Transcontinentals and the Making of Modern America (New York: Norton, 2011), 68.
13. White, Railroaded, 67.
14. Quoted in White, Railroaded, 71.
15. White, Railroaded, 97.
16. Quoted in Alfred D. Chandler, Henry Varnum Poor, Business Editor, Analyst, and Reformer (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1956), 104.
17. Chandler, Henry Varnum Poor, 116.
18. Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report: Final Report of the National Commission on the Causes of the Financial and Economic Crisis in the United States, authorized ed. (New York: Public Affairs, 2011), xxv.
19. Thomas F. Woodlock, “Pioneer Financial News Trio Recalled by Sole Survivor of 1892 Local Staff,” Wall Street Journal, June 27, 1932.
20. Wendt, The Wall Street Journal, 26.
21. Bonnie Kavoussi, “The Panic of 1907: A Human-Caused Crisis, or a Thunderstorm? A Comparision Between the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal’s Coverage of the United States’ First Modern Panic,” in The 1907 Crisis in Historical Perspective, Center for History and Economics, Harvard University, http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~histecon/crisis-next/1907/, 9.
22. Meyer Berger, The Story of the New York Times, 1851–1951 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1951), 109.
23. Kavoussi, “The Panic of 1907,” 9, quoting Berger, The Story of the New York Times, 109.
24. David Kynaston, The Financial Times: A Centenary History (New York: Viking, 1988).
25. Edward E. Scharff, Worldly Power: The Making of the Wall Street Journal (New York: Beaufort, 1986), 23.
26. Wendt, The Wall Street Journal, 31.
27. Francis X. Dealy, The Power and the Money: Inside the Wall Street Journal (Secaucus, N.J.: Birch Lane Press, 1993), 13.
29. Wendt, The Wall Street Journal, 30–31.
30. Quoted in Wendt, The Wall Street Journal, 32.
31. Quoted in Wendt, The Wall Street Journal, 73.
32. Quoted in Wendt, The Wall Street Journal, 76.
33. Dealy, The Power and the Money, 15.
34. Dealy, The Power and the Money, 21–22.
35. Scharff, Worldly Power, 24.
36. Wendt, The Wall Street Journal, 76–77.
37. Wendt, The Wall Street Journal, 89.
38. “Will Not Let Him Alone,” Wall Street Journal, March 4, 1904.
39. Quoted in Wendt, The Wall Street Journal, 90–91.
40. Kavoussi, “The Panic of 1907,” 5.
41. “Clearing House Has Banking Situation Here Well in Hand,” Wall Street Journal, October 22, 1907.
42. Kavoussi, “The Panic of 1907,” 5, 15.
43. Kavoussi, “The Panic of 1907,” 24.
44. Kavoussi, “The Panic of 1907,” 17.
45. Thomas William Lawson, Frenzied Finance (New York: Ridgway-Thayer, 1905), vii.
47. Clarence W. Barron, They Told Barron: Conversations and Revelations of an American Pepys in Wall Street: The Notes of the Late Clarence W. Barron, ed. Arthur Pound and Samuel T. Moore (New York: Harper, 1930), ix.
48. Scharff, Worldly Power, 25, 11.
49. Barron, They Told Barron, xxiii.
50. Wendt, The Wall Street Journal, 108.
51. Dealy, The Power and the Money, 24.
52. Wendt, The Wall Street Journal, 112, 126.
53. Mitchell Zuckoff, Ponzi’s Scheme: The True Story of a Financial Legend (New York: Random House, 2005), 208.
54. Quoted in Dealy, The Power and the Money, 26–27.
55. Dealy, The Power and the Money, 24–25.
56. Barron, They Told Barron, 21.
57. Wendt, The Wall Street Journal, 156.
58. Scharff, Worldly Power, 25.
59. Rosenberg, Inside the Wall Street Journal, 58; Wendt, The Wall Street Journal, 223.
60. Scharff, Worldly Power, 28.
61. Scharff, Worldly Power, 29.
62. Scharff, Worldly Power, 35.
63. Wendt, The Wall Street Journal, 154.
64. Wendt, The Wall Street Journal, 106.
3. KILGORE’S REVOLUTION AT THE WALL STREET JOURNAL: RISE OF THE GREAT STORY
1. Quoted in Francis X. Dealy, The Power and the Money: Inside the Wall Street Journal (Secaucus, N.J.: Birch Lane Press, 1993), 38.
2. “Atchison Net $2.93 on Preferred in ’33,” Wall Street Journal, February 7, 1934.
3. Victor Perlo, “People’s Capitalism and Stock-Ownership,” The American Economic Review 48, no. 3 (1958): 335.
4. Julia C. Ott, When Wall Street Met Main Street: The Quest for an Investors’ Democracy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2011), 23.
5. Archibald MacLeish, “No One Has Starved,” Fortune 6 (September 1932): 22–23; quoted in Michael Augspurger, An Economy of Abundant Beauty: Fortune Magazine and Depression America (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2004), 158.
6. Alan Brinkley, The Publisher: Henry Luce and His American Century (New York: Vintage, 2011), 149.
7. Quoted in Augspurger, An Economy of Abundant Beauty, 6, and Brinkley, The Publisher, 152–53.
8. Brinkley, The Publisher, 152.
9. Daniel Bell et al., Writing for Fortune: Nineteen Authors Remember Life on the Staff of a Remarkable Magazine (New York: Time, 1980), 30, 123.
10. Bell et al., Writing for Fortune, 46.
11. Hedley Donovan, Right Places, Right Times: Forty Years in Journalism, Not Counting My Paper Route (New York: Holt, 1989), 102.
12. Bell et al., Writing for Fortune, 40.
13. Brinkley, The Publisher, 155.
14. Quoted in Robert E. Hertzstein, Henry R. Luce: A Political Portrait of the Man Who Created the American Century (New York: Scribner’s, 1994), 62.
15. Archibald MacLeish, Archibald Macleish: Reflections, ed. Bernard A. Drabeck and Helen E. Ellis (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), 151; Bell et al., Writing for Fortune, 41, 31; Eric Hodgins (unsigned), “Arms and the Men,” Fortune (March 1934).
16. Augspurger, An Economy of Abundant Beauty, 114.
17. Jennifer Szalai, “Mac the Knife: On Dwight Macdonald,” The Nation, Decmber 12, 2011.
18. Bell et al., Writing for Fortune, 155.
19. Bell et al., Writing for Fortune, 18.
20. Quoted in Augspurger, An Economy of Abundant Beauty, 137.
22. Christopher Winans, Malcolm Forbes: The Man Who Had Everything (New York: St. Martin’s, 1990).
23. Quoted in Stewart Pinkerton, The Fall of the House of Forbes: The Inside Story of the Collapse of a Media Empire (New York: St. Martin’s, 2011), 73.
24. Pinkerton, The Fall of the House of Forbes, 75, 101, 72.
25. Richard J. Tofel, Restless Genius: Barney Kilgore, the Wall Street Journal, and the Invention of Modern Journalism (New York: St. Martin’s, 2009),5, 215.
26. Tofel, Restless Genius, 101.
27. Quoted in Tofel, Restless Genius, 61.
28. Quoted in Tofel, Restless Genius, 63.
29. Quoted in Tofel, Restless Genius, 67.
30. Lloyd Wendt, The Wall Street Journal: The Story of Dow Jones and the Nation’s Business Newspaper (Chicago: Rand McNally, 1982), 289.
31. Tofel, Restless Genius, 114.
32. Wendt, The Wall Street Journal, 274.
33. Wendt, The Wall Street Journal, 275.
34. Wendt, The Wall Street Journal, 289.
35. Wendt, The Wall Street Journal, 279.
36. Wendt, The Wall Street Journal, 301.
37. Tofel argues Kilgore’s interest in changing the name has been overstated by historians. He says the memo was Kilgore’s follow-up to an earlier discussion with his then-boss, Hogate, who had suggested the name “Financial America,” and that Kilgore was offering alternatives as a “gentle rebuttal” to Hogate’s idea. The name-change idea was dropped after Hogate’s death not long afterwards (Tofel, Restless Genius, 236).
38. Dealy, The Power and the Money, 49.
39. Tofel, Restless Genius, 169.
40. Tofel, Restless Genius, 170; Andrew L. Yarrow, “The Big Postwar Story: Abundance and the Rise of Economic Journalism,” Journalism History (Summer 2006): 10.
41. Michelangelo Signorile, “The Secret Gay Life of Malcolm Forbes,” Outweek, March 18, 1990, 40; Winans, Malcolm Forbes.
42. Pinkerton, The Fall of the House of Forbes, 119.
43. Winans, Malcolm Forbes, 57, 197.
44. Pinkerton, The Fall of the House of Forbes, 47.
45. Pinkerton, The Fall of the House of Forbes, 122; R. L. Stern and R. Abelson, “The Imperial Agees,” Forbes 149, no. 12(1992).
46. Pinkerton, The Fall of the House of Forbes, 69.
47. Winans, Malcolm Forbes, 187.
48. Winans, Malcolm Forbes, 139.
49. Winans, Malcolm Forbes, 140.
50. Quoted in Stephen Shepard, Deadlines and Disruption: My Turbulent Path from Print to Digital (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2013), 91.
51. Shepard, Deadlines and Disruption, 102, 148.
52. Anthony Bianco, “Power on Wall Street: Drexel Is Reshaping Investment Banking—and U.S. Industry,” Businessweek, July 7, 1986, 56.
53. Katherine Fink and Michael Schudson, “The Rise of Contextual Journalism, 1950s–2000s,” Journalism (February 2013), reviews the literature, citing K. G. Barnhurst and D. Mutz, “American Journalism and the Decline in Event-Centered Reporting,” Journal of Communication 47, no. 4 (1997): 27–53; C. S. Stepp “Then and Now,” American Journalism Review 21 (September 1999): 60–75; S. E. Clayman, M. E. Elliott, J. Heritage, and M. K. Beckett, “A Watershed in White House Journalism: Explaining the post-1968 Rise of Aggressive Presidential News,” Political Communication 27 (2010): 229–47.
54. Fink and Schudson, “The Rise of Contextual Journalism, 1950s–2000s.”
55. William E. Blundell, Story Telling Step by Step: A Guide to Better Feature Writing (New York: Dow Jones, 1986).
56. Bryan Burrough, “Self-Made Man: Top Dealmaker Leaves Trail of Deception in Wall Street Rise,” Wall Street Journal, January 22, 1990.
57. James Sterngold, “Too Far, Too Fast; Salomon Brothers’ John Gutfreund,” New York Times Magazine, January 10, 1988.
59. Loomis, “My Fifty-One Years.”
60. Joseph Nocera, “Heard on the Street: Disgruntled Heiress Leads Revolt at Dow Jones,” Fortune, February 3, 1997; Nocera, “Attention, Dow Jones: Ms. Goth Wants Results Now!,”Fortune, March 2, 1998.
61. Dealy, The Power and the Money, 303.
4. MUCKRAKING GOES MAINSTREAM: DEMOCRATIZING FINANCIAL AND TECHNICAL KNOWLEDGE
1. Michael Hudson, interview with author, May 29, 2011.
2. Michael Hudson, “Trail of the Tin Men,” part of the series Borrowing Trouble, Roanoke Times, December 10, 1994.
5. Michael Hudson, “Homes’ Hurts Easy to Hide,” first in the series Virginians at Risk: Neglect and Abuse in the State’s Adult Homes, Roanoke Times, October 2, 1989.
6. Articles in the Borrowing Trouble series included “Trail of the Tin Men,” December 10, 1994; “Bankers, Critics at Odds: Big Gap Remains in Black-White Loan Approval Rate,” December 11, 1994; and “Little Relief for Consumers: A New Federal Law Will Help, but It Won't Wipe Out Fraud, Abuses,” December 12, 1994.
8. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, pbk. ed. (London: Bodley Head, 2008), xi, xii.
9. James Aucoin, The Evolution of American Investigative Journalism (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005), 21–22, 27.
10. Aucoin, The Evolution of American Investigative Journalism, 28, 30.
11. Charles Francis Adams Jr. and Henry Adams, Chapters of Erie and Other Essays (1871; Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1968), 5.
12. Kathleen Brady, Ida Tarbell: Portrait of a Muckraker (New York: Seaview/Putnam, 1984), 132.
13. Aucoin, The Evolution of American Investigative Journalism, 33.
14. Roy J. Harris Jr., Pulitzer’s Gold: Behind the Prize for Public Service Journalism (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2008), 138.
15. Aucoin, The Evolution of American Investigative Journalism, 36.
16. Aucoin, The Evolution of American Investigative Journalism, 38–39; Bruce Shapiro, ed., Shaking the Foundations: 200 Years of Investigative Journalism in America (New York: Thunder’s Mouth/Nation, 2003), 361.
17. Katherine Fink and Michael Schudson, “The Rise of Contextual Journalism, 1950s–2000s,” Journalism (February 2013).
19. Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols, The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution That Will Begin the World Again (Philadelphia: Nation, 2010), 257, 71.
20. Michael Schudson, The Power of News (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 142.
21. Max Holland, Leak: Why Mark Felt Became Deep Throat (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2012).
22. Aucoin, The Evolution of American Investigative Journalism, 119.
23. Aucoin, The Evolution of American Investigative Journalism, 143.
24. Aucoin, The Evolution of American Investigative Journalism, 128.
25. George Getschow, “Dirty Work: The Day Laborer’s Toil Is Hard, Pay Minimal, Security Nonexistent,” Wall Street Journal, June 22, 1983.
26. Aucoin, The Evolution of American Investigative Journalism, 85, 87.
27. Paul N. Williams, Investigative Reporting and Editing (Upper Saddle River, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1978), 12.
28. Protess et al., The Journalism of Outrage, 10, 92.
29. Peter Benjaminson and David Anderson, Investigative Reporting (Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1976, 1990), 17
30. Protess et al., The Journalism of Outrage, 6.
31. Cited in Protess et al., The Journalism of Outrage, 25n22.
32. Quoted in Aucoin, The Evolution of American Investigative Journalism, 88.
33. Donald Barlett and James B. Steele, “Speculators Make a Killing on FHA Program,” Philadelphia Inquirer, August 22, 1971; Bartlett and Steele, “Wasted Billions: How Your Tax Dollars Were Lost on Synthetic Fuel,” Philadelphia Inquirer, December 9, 1980; Bartlett and Steele, “The Great Tax Giveaway: How the Influential Win Billions in Special Tax Breaks,” Philadelphia Inquirer, April 10, 1988.
34. Donald Barlett and James B. Steele, “How the Game was Rigged Against the Middle Class,” Philadelphia Inquirer, first of a nine day series, October 20, 1991.
35. Gallup Poll, “Investigative Reporting Has Broad Public Support” (1982), cited in Protess et al., The Journalism of Outrage, 14.
36. Editors, “In the Interpreter’s House,” The American (January 1907), cited in Judson A. Grenier, “Muckraking and Muckrakers: An Historical Definition,” Journalism Quarterly (Autumn 1960): 556.
38. Aucoin, The Evolution of American Investigative Journalism, 120.
39. “All Those Glittering Prizes—Your Favorite Writer Didn’t Win a Pulitzer; Should You Care?,” Times Literary Supplement, April 17, 1998.
40. Carol J. Loomis, “Have You Been Cold-Called?,” Fortune, December 16, 1991.
41. Carol J. Loomis, “The Risk That Won’t Go Away,” Fortune, March 7, 1994.
42. “The Ugly Truth About IPOs,” Fortune, July 5, 1999.
43. Stephen Shepard, Deadlines and Disruption: My Turbulent Path from Print to Digital (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2013), 147.
44. Michael Siconolfi, “The Spin Desk: Underwriters Set Aside IPO Stock for Officials of Potential Customers,” Wall Street Journal, November 12, 1997.
45. Frank Partnoy, Infectious Greed: How Deceit and Risk Corrupted the Financial Markets (New York: PublicAffairs, 2009).
46. Timothy L. O’Brien and Raymond Bonner, “Activity at Bank Raises Suspicions of Russian Mob Tie,” New York Times, August 19, 1999; Timothy L. O’Brien, “Follow the Money, If You Can,” New York Times, September 5, 1999; and others.
47. Gretchen Morgenson, “Sleazy Doings on Wall Street,” Forbes, February 24, 1997.
48. Gretchen Morgenson, “Heat from the Boiler Room,” Forbes, March 9, 1998; Gary Weiss, “Did Bear Stearns Ignore a Stock Swindle?” Businessweek, November 23, 1998; “A Slap on Bear’s Paw,” Businessweek, July 12, 1999.
49. Susan C. Faludi, “The Reckoning: Safeway LBO Yields Vast Profits but Exacts a Heavy Human Toll,” Wall Street Journal, May 16, 1990.
50. “Safeway’s CEO Disputes Portrayal,” Wall Street Journal, letter to the editor, 15 June 1990.
52. Ron Chernow, Titan: The Life of John D. Rockefeller, Sr. (New York: Random House, 1998), 554–55.
5. CNBCIZATION: INSIDERS, ACCESS, AND THE RETURN OF THE MESSENGER BOY
1. Herbert J. Gans, Deciding What’s News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek, and Time (1979; Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2004).
2. Pierre Bourdieu, “The Field of Cultural Production” (1993), in The Book History Reader, ed. David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery (London: Routledge, 2002). Bourdieu’s theory is nicely summed up in Rodney Benson and Erik Neveu, “Introduction: Field Theory as a Work in Progress,” in Bourdieu and the Journalistic Field, ed. Rodney Benson and Erik Neveu (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 1–12, esp. 1–4.
3. Edward E. Scharff, Worldly Power: The Making of the Wall Street Journal (New York: Beaufort, 1986), 191, 225, 195.
4. Scharff, Worldly Power, 277.
6. Thomas I. Palley, “Financialization: What It Is and Why It Matters,” Levy Economics Institute Working Paper no. 25, Social Science Research Network, http://ssrn.com/abstract=1077923.
7. Joseph Nocera, A Piece of the Action: How the Middle Class Joined the Money Class (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994), 75, 180.
8. Nocera, A Piece of the Action, 11.
9. Quoted in Nocera, A Piece of the Action, 403.
10. Maggie Mahar, Bull! A History of the Boom, 1982–1999: What Drove the Break-neck Market—and What Every Investor Needs to Know About Financial Cycles (New York: HarperBusiness, 2003), 58–59; 2006 Investment Company Fact Book: A Review of Trends and Activity in the Investment Company Industry, 46th ed. (N.p.: Investment Company Institute, 2006), http://www.ici.org/pdf/2006_factbook.pdf, 73.
12. 2006 Investment Company Fact Book.
13. “The Soaring ’90s: Behind the Investing Giants and Stocks That Marked a Decade,” Wall Street Journal, December 13, 1999.
14. Howard Kurtz, The Fortune Tellers: Inside Wall Street’s Game of Money, Media, and Manipulation (New York: Free, 2000), 26.
15. Kurtz, The Fortune Tellers, 43.
16. Kurtz, The Fortune Tellers, 210.
17. Kurtz, The Fortune Tellers, 31.
18. “Inside the Box: Squawk Box Has Brains, Beauty, Wit—and an Audience of Fanatics. This Is a Stock Market Show?,” Money, July 1, 1998; David Teather, “Maria Bartiromo: Money Honey Who Stirred Ramone’s Hormones: How the Pioneering Reporter Who Had the Pink Pages Panting Became an NYSE Icon and a Punk Muse,” The Guardian, July 13, 2006.
20. Diane B. Henriques, “Business Reporting: Behind the Curve,” Columbia Journalism Review 39, no. 4 (2000): 20.
21. These data are rough and don’t take into account any increase in the number of publications or database changes, including any changes to the tagging system.
22. Dean Starkman, “A Narrowed Gaze,” Columbia Journalism Review 50, no. 5 (2012).
23. Mahar, Bull!, 317, 154.
25. Robert J. Shiller, Irrational Exuberance, 2nd ed. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 43.
27. Shiller, Irrational Exuberance, 120.
29. Quoted in Howard Kurtz, “The Enron Story That Waited to Be Told,” Washington Post, January 18, 2002.
31. Mahar, Bull!, 431n15, cites the interviews with Lay.
32. Monica Langley, Clint Riley, and Robin Sidel, “In Citigroup Ouster, a Battle Over Expenses,” Wall Street Journal, January 24, 2007.
33. Monica Langley, Clint Riley, and Robin Sidel, “In Citigroup Ouster, a Battle Over Expenses,” Wall Street Journal, January 26, 2007.
34. Jeffrey A. Busse and T. Clifton Green, “Market Efficiency in Real Time,” Journal of Financial Economics 65, no. 3 (2002): 13–14.
36. Gabriel Sherman, “The Information Broker,” New York, November 16, 2009.
38. Andrew Ross Sorkin, Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System from Crisis—and Themselves (New York: Viking Penguin, 2009), 535.
39. Sorkin, Too Big to Fail, 533.
40. Sorkin, Too Big to Fail, 81.
41. Moe Tkacik, “Andrew Ross Sorkin’s Book Party Was Filled with CEOs, Warts and All,” New York, October 21, 2009.
6. SUBPRIME RISES IN THE 1990s: JOURNALISM AND REGULA TION FIGHT BACK
1. Christopher L. Peterson, “Predatory Structured Finance,” Cardozo Law Review 28, no. 5 (2007): 2193.
2. Peterson, “Predatory Structured Finance,” 2200.
3. Peterson, “Predatory Structured Finance,” 2204.
5. Joseph Nocera, A Piece of the Action: How the Middle Class Joined the Money Class (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).
6. Marquette National Bank v. First Omaha Service Corp., 439 U.S. 299 (1978).
7. Bethany McLean and Joseph Nocera, All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2010), 29.
11. Quoted in McLean and Nocera, All the Devils Are Here, 31. In fact, the market badly mispriced the risk of subprime lending, principally because, like the business press and others viewing the practice from a distance, it didn’t understand the widespread fraud that lay at the heart of the subprime lending business or the perverse incentives among lenders, rating agencies, and Wall Street banks to perpetuate it. As a result, and as we’ll see, the mainstreaming of subprime would push past all practical, ethical, and commonsense barriers.
12. Louis Hyman, “The House That George Romney Built,” New York Times, February 1, 2012.
13. Paulette Thomas, “Race and Mortgage-Lending in America—Behind the Figures: Federal Data Detail Pervasive Racial Gap in Mortgage Lending,” Wall Street Journal, March 31, 1992.
15. Cited in Longobardi, “How ‘Subprime’ Crushed ‘Predatory.’”
16. Allen Fishbein and Harold Bunce, “Subprime Market Growth and Predatory Lending,” in Housing Policy in the New Meillenium, ed. Susan M. Wachter and R. Leo Penne (Washington, D.C.: Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2000), 280; quoted in Longobardi, “How ‘Subprime’ Crushed ‘Predatory.’”
17. Longobardi, “How ‘Subprime’ Crushed ‘Predatory.’”
19. HUD-Treasury Task Force on Predatory Lending, “Curbing Predatory Home Mortgage Lending.”
20. McLean and Nocera, All the Devils Are Here, 31.
21. Jay P. Pederson, International Directory of Company Histories, vol. 36 (Detroit: St. James Press, 2001).
23. Peter S. Canellos, “Profitable Fleet Finance’s Ethics Questioned,” Boston Globe, June 9, 1991.
24. “A Matter of Interest,” 60 Minutes, November 15, 1992.
25. Michael Hudson, The Monster: How a Gang of Predatory Lenders and Wall Street Bankers Fleeced America—and Spawned a Global Crisis (New York: Times/Henry Holt and, 2010), 59.
26. Peter S. Canellos, “Bankers Under the Gun: Fleet Acts to Fend Off Suits, Protect Its Reputation,” Boston Globe, October 9, 1992.
27. HUD-Treasury Task Force, “Curbing Predatory Home Mortgage Lending,” 85.
28. HUD-Treasury Task Force, “Curbing Predatory Home Mortgage Lending,” 29; Richard Lord, American Nightmare: Predatory Lending and the Foreclosure of the American Dream (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage, 2005), 20.
29. Hudson, The Monster, 186, 103.
30. Hudson, The Monster, 64; Michael Hudson, ed., Merchants of Misery: How Corporate America Profits from Poverty (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage, 1996), 43.
31. Hudson, The Monster, 149, 86.
32. Hudson, The Monster, 24, 187n54.
33. Hudson, ed., Merchants of Misery, 42–52.
34. Hudson, ed., Merchants of Misery, 47.
35. Jeff Bailey, “A Man and His Loan: Why Bennie Roberts Refinanced Ten Times,” Wall Street Journal, April 23, 1997.
36. Hudson, ed., Merchants of Misery, 207; Richard W. Stevenson, “How Serial Refinancings Can Rob Equity,” New York Times, March 22, 1998.
37. George A. Akerlof, “The Market for ‘Lemons’: Quality Uncertainty and the Market Mechanism,” The Quarterly Journal of Economics 84, no. 3 (August 1970): 488–500.
39. Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (New York: Norton, 2010), 3.
40. Lewis, The Big Short, 13–15.
7. MUCKRAKING THE BANKS, 2000–2003: A LAST GASP FOR JOURNALISM AND REGULATION
1. Michael Gregory, “The Predatory Lending Fracas: Wall Street Comes Under Scrutiny in the Subprime Market as Liquidity Suffers and Regulation Looms,” Investment Dealers’ Digest, June 26, 2000.
2. “Greenspan Criticizes Predatory Lending,” Newsday, March 22, 2000.
3. Kevin Guerrero, “Moving Against Preedators, OTS Takes Aim at Loophole,” American Banker, April 5, 2000. The law was Alternative Mortgage Transaction Parity Act of 1982, Pub. L. No. 97-320, title VIII.
4. “More Jump on the Predatory Bandwagon,” CBA Reports 80, no. 5 (2000): 1.
5. We selected a date range of January 1, 2000, through June 30, 2007, with the idea that the early date would capture the entire housing bubble and the later date marked the period after two Bear Stearns hedge funds publicly collapsed and all warnings became moot. We then came up with a commonsense list of the nine most influential business press outlets: the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, Bloomberg News, the Financial Times, Fortune, Businessweek, and Forbes. CNBC and other television outlets were excluded both for practical and substantive reasons. With the help of some colleagues, we searched the Factiva database for the names of important institutions—Bear Stearns, Countrywide, etc.—and matched them with search terms that seemed appropriate, such as “predatory lending,” “mortgage lending,” “securitization,” “collateralized debt obligations,” and the like. Of news outlets that volunteered their best work, some were more diligent than others, so, on that score, the New York Times might tend to be overrepresented, while the Washington Post, which declined to participate, might get shorted. Similarly, Bloomberg, the Financial Times, and the Los Angeles Times posed technical challenges. But while we didn’t hesitate to differentiate among the performance levels of different outlets (and reporters, for that matter), the goal was to assess institutional performance, not who “won.” The list was designed to capture all significant warning stories, not just some of them. The list also includes as guideposts bits of context that we felt would give readers some sense of what was happening on the finance beat at the time (e.g., “Fed Assesses Citigroup Unit $70 Million in Loan Abuse,” NYT, May 28, 2004). Sprinkled throughout are some rah-rah stories (“Mortgage Slump? Bring It On: Countrywide Plans to Grab More of the Market as the Industry Consolidates,” Businessweek, December 15, 2003) and a tiny fraction of the run-of-the-mill stories about important and guilty institutions that in retrospect were far from the salient point (“Power Banking: Morgan Stanley Trades Energy Old-Fashioned Way: In Barrels,” WSJ, March 2, 2005). Our categorization is subjective, of course, but readers are invited to read the color-coded list themselves at www.cjr.org/the_audit/the_list.php and argue for and against stories that might be included in the “red,” investigative category. We believe we were generous in our assignments. The list remains open, and readers are invited to submit samples of great stories we missed to editor@cjr.org.
6. The 2008 Mortgage Market Statistical Annual, 2 vols. (Washington, D.C.: Financial World Publications, 2008).
8. Richard Lord, American Nightmare: Predatory Lending and the Foreclosure of the American Dream (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage, 2005), 29, 30.
9. Kurt Eggert, “Held Up in Due Course: Predatory Lending, Securitization, and the Holder in Due Course Doctrine,” Creighton Law Review 35 (April 2002): 588, 598.
10. Christopher L. Peterson, “Predatory Structured Finance,” Cardozo Law Review 28, no. 5 (2007): 2214n176.
11. Peterson, “Predatory Structured Finance,” 2216n184.
12. Robert Berner and Brian Grow, “They Warned Us About the Mortgage Crisis,” Businessweek, October 8, 2008; Mortgage Bankers Association, press release, “Standard & Poor’s to Disallow Georgia Fair Lending Act Loans,” January 16, 2003, http://www.mortgagebankers.org/NewsandMedia/PressCenter/32153.htm, updated October 12, 2005; see also See Dean Starkman, “Spitzer’s Ghost,” Columbia Journalism Review, October 14, 2008, http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/spitzers_ghost.php.
15. John Hechinger, “How Big Lenders Sell a Pricier Refinancing to Poor Homeowners,” Wall Street Journal, December 7, 2001.
16. Heidi Evans, “Mortgage Scam Targets Poor: Owners Lose Their Homes,” New York Daily News, February 20, 2000.
18. John Stark, “Tough Choices Produced HFC Deal; Documents Detail States’ Efforts to Forge Settlement,” Bellingham Herald, January 5, 2011.
19. Michael Lewis, The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine (New York: Norton, 2010), 18.
8. THREE JOURNALISM OUTSIDERS UNEARTH THE LOOMING MORTGAGE CRISIS
1. Michael Hudson, “Banking on Misery: Citigroup, Wall Street, and the Fleecing of the South,” Southern Exposure 31, no. 2 (2003): sidebar, “Special Child: For Mentally Retarded Borrower, Arbitration a Losing Proposition,” 45.
2. California v. Countywide Financial Corp., et al., California Superior Court, NW dist., June 24, 2008, http://ag.ca.gov/cms_attachments/press/pdfs/n1582_draft_cwide_complaint2.pdf, 9; Dean Starkman, “Boiler Room,” Columbia Journalism Review 47, no. 3 (2008).
3. Michael Hudson, interview with author, May 29, 2011, Brooklyn, N.Y.
4. Michael Hudson, “Banking on Misery: Citigroup, Wall Street, and the Fleecing of the South,” Southern Exposure 31, no. 2 (2003): 25.
5. Michael Perino, The Hellhound of Wall Street: How Ferdinand Pecora’s Investigation of the Great Crash Forever Changed American Finance (New York: Penguin, 2010), 6–8; Michael Perino, interview by Robert Siegel, All Things Considered, NPR, October 6, 2010, http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=130384189.
7. Thomas I. Palley, “Financialization: What It Is and Why It Matters,” Levy Economics Institute Working Paper no. 25, Social Science Research Network, http://ssrn.com/abstract=107792334–37.
8. Simon Johnson, “The Quiet Coup,” The Atlantic Monthly (May 2009).
9. Gillian Tett, interview with author, May 3, 2013.
10. Gillian Tett, “Silence and Silos: The Problems of Fractured Thought in Finance,” paper presented at the 109th meeting of the American Anthropological Association, November 19, 2010, New Orleans; see http://vimeo.com/17854712; Tett, interview with author.
11. Tett, “Silence and Silos” (paper); Tett, interview with author.
12. Gillian Tett, “Searching for Light in Murky Debt Pool,” Financial Times, May 12, 2005; Tett, “Credit the US Banks for the Boom,” Financial Times, July 28, 2005; Tett, “The Dream Machine,” Financial Times, March 24, 2006.
13. Tett, “The Effect of Collateralised Debt Should Not Be Underplayed,” Financial Times, May 18, 2007; Tett, “Financial Wizards Owe a Debt to Ratings Agencies’ Magic,” Financial Times, December 1, 2006.
15. Gillian Tett, “Clouds Sighted Off CDO Asset Pool,” Financial Times, April 18, 2005.
16. Gillian Tett, “Silence and Silos: Who So Few People Spotted the Problems in Complex Credit and What That Implies for the Future,” Financial Stability Review, no. 14, Derivatives—Financial Innovation and Stability (July 2010): 121–29.
17. Gillian Tett, Fool’s Gold: The Inside Story of J.P. Morgan and How Wall Street Greed Corrupted Its Bold Dream and Created a Financial Catastrophe (New York: Free, 2010), 252–53; Tett, “Silence and Silos” (paper).
18. Tett, “Silence and Silos” (paper).
19. Richard Lord, American Nightmare: Predatory Lending and the Foreclosure of the American Dream (Monroe, Maine: Common Courage, 2005), 5. For Lord’s early subprime reporting in the Pittsburgh City Paper, see “Huffing and Puffing: When High-Interest Subprime Lenders Use Predatory Tactics, Borrowers Who Lose Their Homes Through Foreclosure Take It on the Chin,” January 9, 2002; “The Wolf at the Door: National City Bank’s Push Into the Subprime Lending Business Has Led to a Tripling of Foreclosures by its Affiliate, Altegra Credit,” January 16, 2002; “The Hammer and the Nailed: Home Improvement Contractors and Mortgage Brokers Are Herding Pittsburghers Into the Subprime Lending Market,” July 24, 2002.
20. Lord, American Nightmare, 20.
21. Lord, American Nightmare, 19; emphasis added.
22. Richard Lord, interview with author, April 24, 2013; Lord, American Nightmare, 33–34.
23. See, for example, David Brooks, “The Culture of Debt,” New York Times, July 22, 2008; George Will, “The Horrors of a Crisis,” Washington Post, April 13, 2008; Will, “Burning Down the House,” Washington Post, July 11, 2011.
24. Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report: Final Report of the National Commission on the Causes of the Financial and Economic Crisis in the United States, authorized ed. (New York: Public Affairs, 2011), xxvi–xxvii.
25. Also see Bethany McLean and Joseph Nocera, All the Devils Are Here: The Hidden History of the Financial Crisis (New York: Portfolio/Penguin, 2010); David Fiderer, “The Big Lie Annotated: An AEI History of the Financial Crisis,” Feb. 26, 2013, The Big Picture, http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2013/03/the-big-lie-annotated-an-aei-history-of-the-financial-crisis; Ryan Chittum, “The Big Lie of the Crisis, Called Out by the Press,” Columbia Journalism Review, November 11, 2011, http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/the_big_lie_of_the_crisis_call.php, Joseph Nocera, “An Inconvenient Truth,” New York Times, December 19, 2011.
26. Quoted in Michael Hudson, The Monster: How a Gang of Predatory Lenders and Wall Street Bankers Fleeced America—and Spawned a Global Crisis (New York: Times/Henry Holt, 2010), 11.
27. Hudson, The Monster, 2, 257.
28. Hudson, The Monster, 143–44, 222, 229, 257, 228, 221.
29. Michael Hudson and E. Scott Reckard, “Workers Say Lender Ran ‘Boiler Rooms,’” Los Angeles Times, February 4, 2005.
30. Hudson, The Monster, 36.
31. Dean Starkman, “Seidman Sued Over Its Auditing of A.R. Baron,” Wall Street Journal, March 31, 1998.
32. Gary R Weiss, Born to Steal: A Life Inside the Wall Street Mafia (New York: Warner, 2003), 153.
33. Hudson, The Monster, 331n243..
34. Michael Hudson, “Ameriquest’s Ties to Watchdog Group Are Tested: Green-lining Institute Returns a Donation as the Mortgage Giant Faces Lawsuits,” Los Angeles Times, May 22, 2005.
35. Michael Hudson, e-mail to John Corrigan and Scott Reckard, July 8, 2005, provided to the author.
36. Hudson, The Monster, 221; Michael Hudson and E. Scott Reckard, “Workers Say Lender Ran ‘Boiler Rooms,’” Los Angeles Times, February 4, 2005.
38. Hudson, The Monster, 212; McLean and Joseph Nocera, All the Devils Are Here, 138.
39. Ann Hardie, Alan Judd, and Carrie Teegardin, “Borrower Beware: Why Georgia Is a Bad Place to Borrow Money,” Atlanta Journal Constitution, January 30–February 2, 2005.
40. Binyamin Appelbaum and Ted Mellnick, “The Hard Truth in Lending: Blacks Make Home Ownership Gains but Are Four Times More Likely Than Whites to Get High Interest Rates,” Charlotte Observer, August 28, 2005; Binyamin Appelbaum, Rick Rothacker, and Ted Mellnick, “New Industry Fills Void in Minority Lending; Critics Say Borrowers Turn to High-Rate Lenders Because Bank Loans Too Often Not Available,” Charlotte Observer, August 29, 2005; Binyamin Appelbaum “Mortgage Industry Outgrows Federal Regulations,” Charlotte Observer, August 30, 2005.
41. Michael Hudson, memo to WSJ editors, February 20, 2006.
9. THE WATCHDOG THAT DIDN’T BARK: THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ACCOUNTABILITY REPORTING AND THE MORTGAGE FRENZY, 2004–2006
2. On the LA Times cuts, see John Koblin, “Los Angeles Times Cuts Staff for Third Time This Year; 10 Percent of Newsroom Let Go,” New York Observer, October 27, 2008; on the 2007 declines, see Dean Starkman, “How Could 9,000 Business Reporters Blow It?,” Mother Jones (January/February 2009): 24–30; on total job losses, see Robert W. McChesney and John Nichols, The Death and Life of American Journalism: The Media Revolution That Will Begin the World Again (Philadelphia: Nation, 2010), 18
4. Ken Auletta, “Family Business,” The New Yorker, November 3, 2003.
8. Dean Starkman, “The Hamster Wheel,” Columbia Journalism Review 49, no. 3 (September/October 2010): 24–28.
10. Dow Jones, 10-K filing with Securities Exchange Commission, February 28, 2007, http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/29924/000002992407000056/form10k20062284p.htm; Morgan Stanley, 10-K filing with Securities Exchange Commission, February 13, 2007; Rob Kelley, “Is John Mack Worth $40 Million?,” CNNMoney, December 16, 2006, http://money.cnn.com/2006/12/15/news/newsmakers/compensation/.
11. Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report: Final Report of the National Commission on the Causes of the Financial and Economic Crisis in the United States, authorized ed. (New York: Public Affairs, 2011), xviii.
12. Quoted in Starkman, “How Could 9,000 Business Reporters Blow It?”
13. Dean Starkman, “Power Problem,” Columbia Journalism Review 48, no. 1 (2009): 24–34.
15. Peter Coy et al., “Is a Housing Bubble About to Burst?,” Businessweek, July 18, 2004; Jim Carlton, “Home Investments (a Special Report); Boom vs. Bust: The Housing-Price Run-up Can’t Last; the Housing-Price Run-up Will Go on; Two Experts Debate the Issue,” Wall Street Journal, June 14, 2004.
16. Edmund L. Andrews, “The Ever More Graspable, and Risky, American Dream,” New York Times, June 24 2004; Rich Miller and Christopher Palmeri, “Armed and Dangerous? Adjustable-Rate Mortgages Are Pulling in New Home Buyers—but the Risks Are High,” Businessweek, April 12, 2004.
17. Greg Ip and Mark Whitehouse, “Stash Flow: Huge Flood of Capital to Invest Spurs World-Wide Risk Taking,” Wall Street Journal, November 3, 2005; E. S. Browning, “Woodland Haven: U.S. Timberland Gets Pricey as Big Money Seeks Shelter,” November 4, 2005; Patrick Barta and Mary Kissel, “Buying Bridges: From Australia, Money Chases Roads, Airports Around Globe,” Wall Street Journal, December 6, 2005.
18. Michael Schroeder and Greg Ip, “Out of Reach: The Enron Debacle Spotlights Huge Void in Financial Regulation,” Wall Street Journal, December 13, 2001; Jacob M. Schlesinger, “What’s Wrong? The Deregulators: Did Washington Help Set Stage for Current Business Turmoil?,” Wall Street Journal, October 17, 2002.
19. Alan Greenspan, “Risk Transfer and Financial Stabiity,” remarks to the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago’s Forty-First Annual Conference on Bank Structure, Chicago, May 5, 2005, http://www.federalreserve.gov/boarddocs/speeches/2005/20050505/default.htm; Mara Der Hovanesian, Chester Dawson, and Kerry Capell, “Taking Risk to Extremes,” Businessweek, May 22, 2005.
20. Mark Whitehouse and Gregory Zuckerman, “Housing Bears Bet on Shaky Credit,” Wall Street Journal, December 12, 2005.
21. Emily Thornton, “Lehman’s New Street Smarts,” Businessweek, January 18, 2004.
22. Anton R. Valukas, examiner, Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc Chapter 11 Proceedings Examiner Report (Jenner and Block, March 13, 2010), vol. 1, sect. 2, 43–45 and 58–65.
23. Susanne Craig, “Trading Up: To Crack Wall Street’s Top Tier, Lehman Gambles on Going Solo,” Wall Street Journal, October 13, 2004.
24. Andy Serwer, “The Improbable Power Broker: How Dick Fuld Transformed Lehman from Wall Street Also-Ran to Super-Hot Machine,” Fortune, April 13, 2006.
25. Roger Lowenstein, “Alone at the Top,” New York Times Magazine, August 27, 2000; Carol J. Loomis, “Whatever It Takes,” Fortune, November 25, 2002; Monica Langley, “Wall Street’s Toughest Boss,” Wall Street Journal, February 18, 2003.
26. Mitchell Pacelle, Monica Langley, and Sapsford Jathon, “People Power: Two Financiers’ Careers Trace a Bank Strategy That’s Now Hot,” Wall Street Journal, January 16, 2004.
27. Mara Der Hovanesian, “Citigroup: Cleaned Up but Falling Behind,” Businessweek, October 4, 2006; emphasis mine.
28. Marcia Vickers, “The Unlikely Revolutionary,” Fortune, February 27, 2006.
29. Kimberly L. Allers, “A New Banking Model,” Fortune, March 31, 2003.
30. Joseph T. Hallinan, “As Banks Elbow for Consumers, Washington Mutual Thrives,” Wall Street Journal, November 6, 2003.
31. Shawn Tully, “What Went Wrong at WaMu,” Fortune, August 9, 2004.
32. Joseph T. Hallinan, “Revolving Door at WaMu Thrift Is Hurting Stock,” Wall Street Journal, March 8, 2005.
33. Stephen Mihm, “Dr. Doom,” New York Times Magazine, August 17, 2008.
34. Michael Hudson, interview with author, May 29, 2011, Brooklyn, N.Y.
35. Michael Hudson, “Can Junk-Bond Funds’ Streak Continue as Economy Slows, Default Rates Rise?,” Wall Street Journal, August 11 2006; Hudson, “Market Puts Bet Behind Bernanke,” Wall Street Journal, August 7 2006.
36. Gregory Zuckerman and Michael Hudson, “Moving the Market: Mortgage Industry Starts to Roil Bond Markets,” Wall Street Journal, December 8, 2006.
37. Jon Hilsenrath, telephone interview with author, February 26, 2013.
38. Diana B. Henriques and Lowell Bergman, “Mortgaged Lives: Profiting from Fine Print with Wall Street’s Help,” New York Times, March 15, 2000.
39. Kate Kelly, “A ‘Subprime’ Fund Is on the Brink,” Wall Street Journal, June 16, 2007. Jody Shenn of Bloomberg and Matthew Goldstein in Businessweek had explored the problematic nature of the funds’ assets a month earlier: Shenn, “Bear Stearns Funds Own 67 Percent Stake in Everquest (Update3),” Bloomberg News, May 11, 2007; Goldstein, “Bear Stearns’ Subprime IPO,” Businessweek, May 11, 2007.
40. Serena Ng and Carrick Mollenkamp, “Merrill Takes $8.4 Billion Credit Hit,” Wall Street Journal, October 25, 2007; Mollenkamp and Ng, “Wall Street Wizardry Amplified Credit Crisis,” Wall Street Journal, December 27, 2007.
41. Mark Pittman, conversation with author, 2009; Pittman, “S&P, Moody’s Mask $200 Billion of Subprime Bond Risk,” Bloomberg News, June 29, 2007; Pittman, “Paulson’s Focus on ‘Excesses’ Shows Goldman Gorged,” Bloomberg News, November 5, 2007.
42. Gretchen Morgenson, “Behind Biggest Insurer’s Crisis, a Blind Eye to a Web of Risk,” New York Times, September 28, 2008.
44. Subcommittee on Investigations, Wall Street and the Financial Crisis, 96.
45. Subcommittee on Investigations, Wall Street and the Financial Crisis, 103.
46. Mara Der Hovanesian, “Nightmare Mortgages,” Businessweek, September 20, 2006.
47. Subcommittee on Investigations, Wall Street and the Financial Crisis, 147; Sawall Chan, “Ex-Chief Claims WaMu Was Not Treated Fairly,” New York Times, April 14, 2010.
48. Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, The Financial Crisis Inquiry Report, 47.
49. Mara Der Hovanesian, “Sex, Lies, and Subprime,” Businessweek, November 12, 2008; Michael Hudson, “Fraud and Folly: The Untold Story of General Electric’s Subprime Debacle,” Center for Public Integrity, January 6, 2012, http://www.publicintegrity.org/2012/01/06/7802/fraud-and-folly-untold-story-general-electric-s-subprime-debacle.
50. Subcommittee on Investigations, Wall Street and the Financial Crisis, 152.
51. Subcommittee on Investigations, Wall Street and the Financial Crisis, 153; Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, 64, 63; Ben Walsh, “The Multimillionaire Men of Lehman,” Reuters Blogs, April 30, 2012, http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2012/04/30/the-multimillionaire-men-of-lehman/. Hudson, “Fraud and Folly.”
52. Alex Blumberg, “The Giant Pool of Money,” This American Life, prod. Ira Glass, NPR (2008).
10. DIGITISM, CORPORATISM, AND THE FUTURE OF JOURNALISM: AS THE HAMSTER WHEEL TURNS
2. Produced in cooperation with NPR’s This American Life and Planet Money.
3. Ryan Chittum, “Missing the Moment,” in Bad News: How America’s Business Press Missed the Story of the Century, ed. Anya Schiffrin (New York: New Press, 2011), 123.
4. Ryan Chittum, “A BusinessWeek Cover Crosses a Line,” Columbia Journalism Review, February 28, 2013, http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/businessweeks_cover_crosses_th.php; Chittum, “More on That Businessweek Cover,” Columbia Journalism Review, February 28, 2013, http://www.cjr.org/the_audit/more_on_that_businessweek_cove.php.
6. Kocienewski’s entire series, “Nobody Pays That,” is catalogued by the Times at http://topics.nytimes.com/top/features/timestopics/series/but_nobody_pay_that/index.html. Barstow’s entire series, “Wal-Mart Abroad: How a Retail Giant Fueled Growth with Bribes,” is catalogued by the Times at http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/business/walmart-bribery-abroad-series.html. See, specifically, David Kocieniewski, “At G.E. on Tax Day, Billions of Reasons to Smile,” New York Times, March 25, 2011; “U.S. Has High Business Tax Rates, Technically,” New York Times, May 3, 2011; “Companies Push for a Tax Break on Foreign Cash,” New York Times, June 20 2011; “Rich Tax Breaks Bolster Makers of Video Games,” New York Times, September 10, 2011; “A Family’s Billions, Artfully Sheltered,” New York Times, November 27, 2011; “Tax Benefits from Options as Windfall for Businesses,” New York Times, December 29, 2011; Marjorie Connelly, “Americans Favor Budget Cuts Over Raising Corporate Tax,” New York Times, May 3, 2011. David Barstow, “Vast Mexico Bribery Case Hushed Up by Wal-Mart After Top-Level Struggle,” New York Times, April 22, 2012; David Barstow and Alejandra Xanic von Bertrab, “The Bribery Aisle: How Wal-Mart Used Payoffs to Get Its Way in Mexico,” New York Times, December 18, 2012.
8. Allen Neuharth, Confessions of an S.O.B. (New York: Doubleday, 1989), 257.
9. Neuharth, Confessions of an S.O.B., 258; Thomas Frank, One Market Under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism, and the End of Economic Democracy (New York: Doubleday, 2000), 331.
10. David Carr, “At Flagging Tribune, Tales of a Bankrupt Culture,” New York Times, October 6, 2010.
11. Quoted in Sarah Ellison, War at the Wall Street Journal: Inside the Struggle to Control an American Business Empire (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2010), 186–87.
12. Michael Wolff, The Man Who Owns the News: Inside the Secret World of Rupert Murdoch (New York: Broadway, 2008), 250.
14. Ellison, War at the Wall Street Journal, 219; Jessica E. Vascellaro, Merissa Marr, and Sam Schechner, “Editor out as Murdoch Speeds Change at WSJ,” Wall Street Journal, April 23, 2008.
16. Ann Davis Vaughan, “The Gestation Period of a Llama (Or Why I Quit The Wall Street Journal),” in Ink Stained: Essays by the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism Class of 1992, ed. J. J. Hornblass, Michele Turk, and Tom Vogel, unpublished draft manuscript, 25–30.
17. Nick Davies and Amelia Hill, “Missing Milly Dowler’s Voicemail Was Hacked by News of the World,” Guardian, July 4, 2011; Robert Shrimsley, “Murdoch Faces the British Spring,” Financial Times, July 14, 2011.
18. Ben H. Bagdikian, “Lords of the Global Village,” The Nation, June 12, 1989; reprint, in The Journalist’s Moral Compass: Basic Principles, ed. Steven R. Knowlton and Patrick Parsons (Westport, Conn.: Praeger, 1994), 198.
19. James W. Carey, A Critical Reader (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 138.
20. Dean Starkman, “Confidence Game,” Columbia Journalism Review (November/December 2011), 121–30.
21. Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (New York: Penguin, 2009), 107.
22. Jeff Jarvis, “Digital First: What It Means for Journalism,” Guardian, June 26, 2011, emphasis added.
27. David Wood, “Beyond the Battlefield: From a Decade of War, an Endless Struggle for the Severely Wounded,” ten-part series, beginning, October 10, 2011, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/news/beyond-the-battlefield/; Timothy Burke and Jack Dickey, “Manti Te’o’s Dead Girlfriend, the Most Heartbreaking and Inspirational Story of the College Football Season, Is a Hoax,” Deadspin, January 17, 2013, http://deadspin.com/manti-teos-dead-girlfriend-the-most-heartbreaking-an-5976517; David Carr, “Chasing Armstrong with Truth,” New York Times, October 28, 2012; and Michael Ashenden, interview by Andy Shen, NY Velocity, April 3, 2009, http://nyvelocity.com/content/interviews/2009/michael-ashenden.
30. Jeremy B. Merrill, Charles Ornstein, Tracy Weber, Sisi Wei, and Dan Nguyen, “Dollars for Docs: How Industry Dollars Reach Your Doctors,” ProPublica, http://projects.propublica.org/docdollars/, updated March 11, 2013; “Reddit Apologizes for Speculating About Boston Marathon Suspects,” Huffington Post, April 22, 2013, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/04/22/reddit-boston-marathon-apology-suspects_n_3133472.html; Anderson, Bell, and Shirky, Post-Industrial Journalism, 22.
32. C. W. Anderson, Rebuilding the News: Metropolitan Journalism in the Digital Age (Philadelphia: Temple University Press 2013), 162–63.
33. Anderson, Bell, and Shirky, Post-Industrial Journalism, 3, 75.