Felix Salmon wonders why the execrable JOBS bill was so badly covered by the news:
Bloomberg, yesterday, and the NYT, today, have come out with big news articles about the dangers and complications inherent in the JOBS Act. The NYT has found a Davis Polk note to clients saying that the JOBS Act represents “the most significant legislative loosening in memory of restrictions around the IPO process and public company reporting obligations”. As Ben Walsh documents, this is something which was well known to the opinion side of most news organizations weeks ago, but only seems to be dawning on the news side right now, after it’s too late.
He notes that some of the problem stems from the fact that lobbyists are very influential and effective at getting their message out, so unless there are competing industries on something like this, the reporters have to depend upon politicians and consumer groups for critiques and they evidently aren’t worth bothering with. And there are also regional reasons why these issues are covered oddly — Wall Street reporters let’s the DC people do it their way, and in this case, the San Francisco press (which covers silicon valley) is just clueless about politics.
But this is the big problem:
More generally, I think that there are certain stories which are simply easier to tell if the journalist writing them is allowed to have an opinion. Today’s NYT story is quite hard on the JOBS Act, if you read the whole thing, but you first need to get past five paragraphs of introductory scene-setting and a headline (“Wall Street Examines Fine Print in a Bill for Start-Ups”) which betrays nothing about how generous the act is or the degree to which it dismantles longstanding investor protections.
And of course, being impartial journalism, it has to be larded with on-the-other-hand quotes from people like the former head of the NASD, including this classic:
One Wall Street executive familiar with the JOBS Act but who declined to be named said the law would give firms “more flexibility” in covering emerging companies.
Is it now NYT policy to grant anonymity to sources who are simply asserting what seems to be a simple checkable fact?
Opinion journalists don’t need to worry about this kind of thing, and can come out and say what they mean, without having to ensure that any opinions in the piece are attributed to named or anonymous sources. And I fear that when opinion journalists are covering a story quite closely, as they did in this case, the news side sometimes feels that they don’t need to duplicate what the opinion side has already done. Until they can find some kind of new angle, even if it’s just the fact that Wall Street banks get lawyers to read a new law before they change their ways.
This one was particularly awful and I have to confess that I didn’t see it coming until recently either. And part of the problem was that I wasn’t keeping up with the right blogs — the mainstream media ignored the story. The only people I saw making a fuss about it were Chris Hayes and Elliot Spitzer.
I featured Spitzer’s comment yesterday. Here’s Hayes’ segment:
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If the consequences of this bill are what these critics say they will be, we’ll be tearing our hair out not too long from now wondering how in the hell it happened. And it will be yet another huge failure of democratic governance and journalism. Again.
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