Why Were Financial Reporters so Blind?

Jesse Eisinger was one of the few financial reporters to sound an early warning about Wall Street's financial meltdown. In an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review, he explains that business reporters failed to see it coming because "the people who have gravitated to business journalism didn't get into journalism for the same reasons that people in political journalism tended to get into journalism. ... It's not necessarily fired by a sense that we should right society's wrongs. ... We lived in a period where the operating ethos was that business was efficient; that markets could solve our problems; that the imaginative people in our society was entrepreneurs, and it was very easy to be disdainful of government." Writing for the American Journalism Review, however, Chris Roush argues that the business media "have done yeoman's work during the past decade-plus to expose wrongdoing in corporate America."