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July 29, 2002
Tom Stephens
Fast
Track and the
Hypocrites of the House
Linda Belanger
Why Do They Do It?
Alfredo Castro
Colombia's
Disappeared
Anne Brodsky
Inside Pakistan and
Afghanistan with RAWA
Andrew George
The Fires
of Summer:
Don't Blame the Greens
David Vest
A Blind Mule and
a Box of Medals
July 28, 2002
Bob Geary
Our Dinner
with Fidel Castro
July 27, 2002
Ian Daoust
The New
Mahler, Seattle Style
Gavin Keeney
Zizek
and Lenin
Ralph Nader
Citigroup
Heal Thyself
M. Shahid Alam
American
Presidents (Poem)
Mokhiber / Weissman
Push Back: Women Take
on the Corporate Beasts
July 26, 2002
Jerre Skog
American
Dictatorship:
It Couldn't Happen...Could It?
Philip Farruggio
Lie,
Rob and Steal
Rep. Ron Paul
Monitor
Thy Neighbor
Ron Jacobs
Thinking
About the
Weather (Underground)
Walt Brasch
Ashcroft's War on Bookstores
July 25, 2002
Norman Madarasz
Paul
Krugman's Howl:
Populism, War and
the Melting Economy
Gavin Keeney
Van Morrison: In September
Rep. Cynthia McKinney
War
on Terrorism or
Police State?
July 24, 2002
Gary Leupp
An Islam Primer
July 23, 2002
Jeffrey St. Clair
The Battle
for Zuni Salt Lake
Ansar Ahmed
Am I with You, George?
Bill Christison
The
Disastrous Foreign Policies of the US: Oppression Abroad Means
Repression at Home
July 22, 2002
Rick Giombetti
Glaxo Raises White Flag
in Paxil Case
Wayne Madsen
Forbidden
Truth
The Press, Bush, Oil
and the Taliban
July 21. 2002
Francis A. Boyle
The Rogue Elephant
Jennifer Harbury
Why are
the FBI & CIA Targeting Me?
Joan Claybrook
Time
for a Special Prosceutor
for Thomas White
Gloria Bergen
The Struggle
of Workers
in Palestine
Dave Marsh
Mr. Big Stuff:
Alan Lomax, Great White Fraud
James T. Phillips
"I'll
Tell You No Lies"
The Human Rubble of War
July 20, 2002
Gavin Keeney
The Grave
New Urbanism
World Trade Center Burlesque
Jacob Levich
"I
Was Schooled in Hate"
Confessions of a
Summer Camp Terror Tot
Thomas Croft
Augusta,
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Growing Up in the Deep South
Alexander Cockburn
The
Market Hogwallow:
Popgun Populism Isn't Enough
July 19, 2002
Abe Bonowitz / SueZann
Bosler
A Discussion
with Jeb Bush on the Death Penalty
Jonathan Power
No Need
for War Against Iraq
Rick Giombetti
Qwest
Death Watch
Kurt Nimmo
Of Mice,
Bullets & Bombs
M. Shahid Alam
Through
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Is Eurocentrism Unique?
July 18, 2002
Mokhiber / Weissman
Business
As Usual
Jerre Skog
I Spy: Now
Let's be Fair,
the USA Ain't East Germany
Ralph Nader
The CEO
Crimewave:
Corporate Socialism
Mahbubul Karim (Sohel)
The Rising Tensions
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July
30, 2002
Financial
Journalism:
A Very Small Cog
by PS Burton
The media have increasingly excited the attentions
of the left over the past 20 years or so. The consensus seems
to be that the media play a significant role in sustaining capitalism,
whether by encouraging people to buy needless consumer goods,
or by perpetuating the idea that there is only one realistic
way of organising society, or by whipping up prejudices against
ethnic minorities, "scroungers" and trade union activists.
By and large, the left has fumed impotently at the influence
that the modern media is said to enjoy. The recent conflicts
in the Middle East and the Balkans have given new opportunities
to these opponents to sound off. Their fury at the complicity
of the media in "imperialism" has, if anything, been
more savage than their criticisms of those who are actually responsible
for the interventions. For many on the left, it often seems,
the media have become the most convenient whipping boys for the
ills of modern capitalism. After all, they offer a softer target
than those who control the media (and far more besides), while
the notion that the influence of the media is all-pervasive and
seemingly unbreakable provides the perfect excuse for inaction.
Financial journalism is an odd subset
of the media. Its practitioners are sometimes better paid than
their peers in other branches of the media, partly because they
are assumed to have some specialist knowledge and are less likely
to panic at the sight of sets of numbers. Yet financial journalists,
for all their unavoidable closeness to the heart of the system,
have not been singled out as particularly objectionable accomplices
of capitalism. This may be changing, as recent events in the
financial markets have turned the spotlight on the role that
they perform. Why have financial journalists not been quicker
to blow the whistle on the succession of corporate scandals that
have been making headlines in the United States? Why did they
not expose the chicanery of the "dotcom bubble" before
it burst, or, to take a British example, the fleecing of savers
at Equitable Life?
It is true that the investigative record
of financial journalists is pathetic. Anyone who remembers the
Blue Arrow scandal, in the dim and distant 1980s, may recall
a cover story in the Economist that severely embarrassed the
NatWest Bank and led to a lengthy trial. Yet none of the major
financial shenanigans of the past 20 years has been exposed as
a result of painstaking investigative work by teams of expert
journalists. There are a few honorable exceptions. Greg Palast
and George Monbiot dig out corporate dirt, and the back pages
of Private Eye delve into dealings in the City of London. Beyond
the small world of conventional financial journalism there is
a large and growing body of anticorporate and "antiglobalisation"
literature. Back in the mainstream, however, financial journalism
serves more as a mouthpiece for companies than as their tormentor.
Why is this so? The blame lies partly
with the individuals concerned. Financial journalists, like any
journalists, are sometimes lazy. Given the choice between a story
that is fed to them by a corporate public relations department,
complete with contacts and quotes, and having to ferret something
out, speak to uncooperative people and convince an editor to
go out on a limb, many financial journalists have got into the
habit of taking the easier option.
Corruption also plays its part. There
are plenty of opportunities for companies to subvert financial
journalists through the usual blandishments of foreign trips,
hospitality, outings to sporting events and occasional scoops.
The companies doing the subverting often have very deep pockets.
Yet financial journalists are not necessarily more prone to this
kind of corruption than those on trade publications, where the
relationships between companies and the media tend to be even
more incestuous, or those writing for the travel, sports, or
fashion pages of newspapers. Political journalists are not always
bought with such obvious baubles as trips to inspect factories
in exotic locations or conferences in the South of France, but
the promise of inside knowledge, access, influence and association
with the trappings of power can be every bit as important in
shaping their views, and compromising their readiness to think
outside the terms of Westminster or Washington debates.
Ignorance is also part of the equation.
Financial journalists are often unable to bring any particularly
strong analytical skills to bear on the subjects under discussion.
Few of them can make any sustainable claims to be "experts"
on, for instance, the tricks of the accountancy profession or
the bullshit of management consultants. They may be rather more
numerate than some of their peers and they may have a higher
boredom threshold when it comes to the minutiae of the financial
world, but they are seldom in a position to challenge the assumptions
and projections behind financial models. They may instinctively
know that the expected results are implausible but they are reluctant
to throw around accusations that they cannot readily substantiate
and that might lead only to their exclusion from further contacts.
More often than not, they are limited in their ability to criticise
by their inability to obtain any detailed critical information
at all, let alone within the timeframe required to produce a
feature article.
However, the real determining factors
that shape the nature of financial journalism go beyond the personalities
and knowledge of individuals. First, mainstream financial journalists
are mostly giving their readers what they want to hear. People
who turn to the financial pages of the established media do so
largely because of their own financial concerns. They want reassurance--that
share prices and house prices are going up, that interest rates
are staying low, that "confidence indicators" are improving,
that jobs are secure (theirs, if nobody else's) and that profitability
is rising. Financial journalists are not employed to dash those
hopes but to help to preserve the "confidence" that--as
we argued in Biceps Commentary 7--is the most important commodity
in contemporary capitalism.
In this context, it is hardly surprising
that investigative work on the financial pages is so poorly resourced.
In the case of Britain, for example, the volumes of newsprint
and digging devoted to matters such as the "Martin Sixsmith
affair" (a dispute between a couple of civil servants in
a middle-ranking ministry) or the "Black Rod affair"
(a trivial constitutional squabble indirectly involving Tony
Blair and the Queen) tell their own story. If the British press
gave as much attention to the circulation of corporate e-mails
as it did to Martin Sixsmith's, we might have seen rather more
in the way of corporate and financial crimes being exposed.
The press doesn't do this, because the
proprietors of the media don't want it to. The vast majority
of journalism in western countries is financed, indirectly, by
advertising revenues. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that
the press shows only a limited desire to bite the hand that feeds.
Once some corporate charlatan or other has been disgraced--be
it a Robert Maxwell or a Kenneth Lay--journalists revel in the
chance to dance on the corpse and to let their frustrations out.
In contrast, it takes a very determined journalist, a very supportive
financial editor and a somewhat foolhardy managing editor to
take on someone who has yet to be publicly besmirched. As the
Robert Maxwell affair demonstrated, Britain's libel laws also
give ruthless bullies a lot of latitude to defend their reputation.
Thus a kind of self-censorship prevails: it is permissible to
identify rotten apples, but it is effectively impossible to point
out that the whole orchard is diseased .
As a result, proprietors themselves seldom
have to lay down the law in order to stifle investigations and
smother opinions. They do still have every interest in preventing
the emergence of a culture of financial journalism in which their
affairs would be open to as much scrutiny as those of their competitors.
Rupert Murdoch's tax affairs would repay a close and independent
investigation,. but the Daily Mail isn't going to mount one,
nor is the Daily Telegraph. Only if Murdoch goes bust will they
wade in to reveal what they were afraid to say beforehand. So
long as "entrepreneurs" play within the lax rules of
the system, no other media owner has any interest in drawing
attention to the extent to which their rivals are exploiting
those rules.
Where does this leave financial journalists?
For the most part, being paid quite a lot of money to peddle
half-truths. Are they any more invidious, as individuals, than
any of the other journalists doing the same sort of thing? Probably
not. If they want to feel better about themselves, they can probably
pass more of the snippets they do pick up to the anticorporate
outlets, or they can give up their expensive lifestyles and try
to find something they can do with a clear conscience.
More importantly, where does this leave
those who rely on financial journalists for information, if only
faute de mieux. We need not waste any tears on those who take
financial journalists at their word, voluntarily put their own
money into a fraudulent or crazy investment scheme, and lose
every penny. They must carry at least some responsibility for
their own gullibility and greed, and most of them can look after
themselves anyway.
As for the rest of us, at this late stage
in the development of the mainstream media, we too would have
only ourselves to blame if we took any journalism, let alone
financial journalism, at face value, without reflecting on where
the information comes from and why exactly it is being conveyed.
In fact, however, one of the few hopeful signs in the current
climate of neoliberal hegemony is that those who rule us tend,
on the whole, to be far more gullible, far more lacking in sheer
common sense, than those who are ruled. You would have to be
as vain, ignorant, cloistered and paranoid as Tony Blair clearly
is to take the mainstream media more seriously than they deserve
to be taken--which isn't much. Fortunately, most people are still
more sceptical about what they are told than the left, in particular,
gives them credit for. Indeed, it is that healthy scepticism
that accounts, to some extent, for the failure of much of the
left to convince any great numbers of people that it offers any
reliable alternative to the current system--but that's a separate
debate.
Meanwhile, in a world governed by jawdroppingly
stupid and dangerous idiots, advised and encouraged by the professional
liars and fraudsters of the public relations, advertising and
policy-wonk "industries", the harm that any financial
journalist can do is minimal, and the good that a few of them
manage to do--by exposing the extremely shaky foundations of
the capitalist system--just about compensates. In relation to
the world of finance, it makes more sense to focus on the activities
of the financial institutions themselves, taking data from the
media but forming one's own opinions about them, than to waste
time and energy on sifting claims about the supposed influence
of the messengers over the message. Of course the mainstream
media in any capitalist society serve the interests of capitalism:
given their sources of finance, information, staff and support,
what else could they be expected to do? To underestimate the
importance of the media may be naive, and the work of exposing
their true nature and developing alternatives is vital, but to
overestimate their influence is at least equally naive, and at
its worst can amount to giving up without a fight.
Financial journalism, then, is best understood
as just another part of the mainstream media, to be handled with
scepticism at best and utter disbelief at worst. It is true that
Enron, for example, could not have deceived so many people for
so long without help from financial journalists; yet it is also
true that at least some of those people were all too willing
to be deceived, and would have been even if the business pages
did not exist. It is true, too, that most of us (at any rate,
most of us outside the United States) would never even have heard
of Enron if financial journalists had not helped to uncover the
scandal and convey its implications to their readers and viewers.
Even so, it was Enron itself that carried out the frauds (with
help from various accomplices), and then, having collapsed, presented
the spectacle of capitalism as it really is, thus making a bigger
impact on society at large--at least for a short while, until
the next big scandal--than any financial journalist could ever
hope to make on his/her own initiative. Instead of getting obsessed
with those who report the switches and swerves of the financial
world, the left would do better to focus attention on the hucksters
who own and control the rollercoaster--and, better still, to
start thinking seriously about demolishing the rollercoaster
and replacing it.
PS Burton
is a columnist for The British
Institute of Contemporary Economic and Political Studies.
Today's Features
Tom Stephens
Fast
Track and the
Hypocrites of the House
Linda Belanger
Why Do They Do It?
Alfredo Castro
Colombia's
Disappeared
Anne Brodsky
Inside Pakistan and
Afghanistan with RAWA
Andrew George
The Fires
of Summer:
Don't Blame the Greens
David Vest
A Blind Mule and
a Box of Medals
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