There Were Several Reasons For The Increase In Television Attention To The S&l Scandal

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The problems involved in news coverage of economic issues were exemplified by limited and delayed coverage of widespread failures of savings and loan associations in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Former Wall Street Journal reporter Ellen Hume writes that when Michael Gartner, president of NBC News, was asked why television hadn't covered the crisis much even after it made headlines in 1988, he commented "that the story didn't lend itself to images, and without such images, 'television can't do facts.'"

In 1990, the problem that had surfaced years earlier finally received wide coverage. There were several reasons for the GHD Pretty In Pink increase in television attention to the S&L scandal: (1) it was estimated that the cost of a federal bailout might reach $500 billion; (2) respected members of Congress, including five prominent senators, were shown to have delayed measures to limit costs in response to lobbying and campaign contributions from the thrifts; and (3) President Bush's son Neil, a director of the Silverado Banking, Savings and Loan ...
... Association in Denver, was charged with a conflict of interest in its delayed closing and was sued by federal regulators, who charged that '"gross negligence' had led to a collapse that could cost taxpayers more than $1 billion." News coverage had been delayed by the lack of economic expertise among reporters and by the complexity and geographic spread of the story.

Specialized media outlets, whose reporters had the expertise to interpret what was occurring, broke the story earlier. In 1983, the American Banker linked a New York City deposit broker (later convicted of fraud) to a criminal investigation of several Midwestern banks that were short tens of millions of dollars. In 1985, the National Mortgage News began to detect that, in many cases, failing savings institutions had been defrauded. In 1989, two of its reporters, Stephen Pizzo and Paul Muolo, along with Mary Fricker, a financial reporter at the Santa Rosa (Calif.) Press Democrat, published Inside Job: The Looting of America's Savings and Loans. The book appeared on the New York Times best-seller list.

Stan Strachan, editor and one of the founders of the National Mortgage News commented that if the savings crisis had "reached the public consciousness a few years earlier, we could have saved a huge amount of money."

Commenting on the difficulty in getting stories on this problem published, Tom Freedman, formerly legislative director to Representative Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.), asserted: "The nuts and bolts of banking and housing legislation were not 'sexy' issues." He added: "In Washington, there is widespread acceptance of the idea that the public doesn't want complicated news." In such cases, news norms affect political decision making. Only certain kinds of stories will attract coverage by journalists, and this coverage in turn creates the public concern that energizes lawmakers. When complex issues don't attract news coverage, politicians are likely to ignore them to focus on simpler, more dramatic issues whose coverage has aroused public concern.

The economy is complex. Economists speak in a language not readily intelligible to the general population. No single economic indicator, of itself, gives a complete and accurate picture of the country's economic condition. Because it is a construct, the economy cannot be televised in the same way a battle or a presidential inauguration can. Consequently, television seeks out the human interest angle in an economic story and focuses on the rate of inflation, translated into the increased cost of a basket of groceries in representative cities; on the Federal GHD MK5 Housing Administration and Veterans Administration mortgage rates, translated into how much more it will cost some average citizen this month to buy an FHA- or VA-financed home; and on the unemployment rate, translated into a story of the impact of continued unemployment on a specific worker in South Succotash. Because these facets of the economy lend themselves to bar graphs plotting change from month to month and to representative illustrations, coverage of these aspects is the mainstay of the economic news that a viewer can expect to see on television, along with interviews of such national figures as Alan Greenspan, head of the Federal Reserve System.