ABSTRACT
Criticism of financial and business journalists is not new.1 They have faced their share of public criticism both before and since the 2007 credit crisis. The charge sheet is a long one: financial journalists are criticized for superficiality and for a failure to conduct investigations (Davis 2005, Wilby 2007, Doyle 2006), for inappropriate news values (Doyle 2006). They are criticized for being insufficiently sceptical (Doyle 2006), and captured (Starkman 2009). The following passage, from Columbia Journalism Review (Brady 2003), focuses on the role of CNBC during the first dotcom boom and bust in the US:
Critics claim that CNBC’s on-screen personalities led the charge into the speculative stocks of the 1990s, stocks that eventually imploded. There are professional questions, as well, about the network’s cheerleading coverage of Wall Streeters who were extolling stocks that those same analysts were privately calling ‘crap.’ The Merrill Lynch analyst Henry Blodget, for one example, had been a frequent guest on CNBC. His Internet stocks all came crashing down, and eventually it was learned that he’d been recommending stocks on-air that he privately called ‘junk.’ … Alan Abelson, the respected financial columnist of Barron’s, comes down hard on the channel. ‘CNBC,’ he says bluntly, ‘was a product of the stockmarket mania. They contributed to it, and they ate off it.’
