Your Power-Worshiping, Maliciously Negligent Media At Work

Last week, as the bailout bill was being debated, the blog Naked Capitalism [1] got its hands on the tape of a secret Treasury Department conference call whereby government officials reassured Wall Street speculators that all the supposed Democratic "improvements" to Henry Paulson's original bill were specifically written to be unenforceable. Writers like Matt Stoller [2] and me did everything we could to push this outrageous news out there before the bailout vote happened, and were met with almost complete silence from the traditional media that was shamelessly pushing the bailout package.

The closest we got to traditional media coverage was (oddly enough) Fox News on 10/1. The network noted my In These Times story [3] that reported on the conference call, and then asked Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) about it (she replied "I don't know if it's true, I would be surprised" and then added that if it was true, "that would obviously hurt" the bailout bill's prospects in the House). But other than that Fox News report, Democratic politicians were allowed to blanket the radio and television airwaves insisting that they had really "improved" the bill.

So, I can't decide whether to laugh or cry when I read this story in the Wall Street Journal [4] today, days AFTER the bailout bill passed.

Here's the key excerpt:

As the biggest market intervention in U.S. history made its way through Congress, Neel Kashkari, the Treasury official named this week to run the program, offered assurances to 800 financial-industry players.

Attempts by Congress to make beneficiaries pay for their mistakes, such as placing caps on executive pay, were "quite reasonable" and "a pretty modest hindrance to you," he told them, according to a recording of the Sept. 28 conference call made public [on the Internet].

The piece is stunning for two reasons. First, the Journal portrays this as an undiscovered scoop, when it's been out there for more than a week. Second, there is something sick about the media knowing about this story, and only being willing to cover it after the bailout vote that - according to Harman - it might have severely impacted. It reminds me of media outlets that promoted the Bush administration's pre-war WMD case and ignored those who questioned that case before the war, and then after the invasion, patted themselves on the back for later reporting that the WMD case was false.

This is yet another example of A) why the blogosphere/progressive media is important B) why we shouldn't simply take what the media and punditocracy says at face value C) the traditional media's really disgusting efforts to ignore what the progressive media is way out ahead of them on and D) the traditional media's willingness to question power ONLY after that power has been wielded, not before when it really counts.