Thursday, January 24, 2013

CJR: "Financial crisis bodies are still surfacing"

One of the reason's there has only been one award of a Pulitzer for "Financial Crisis" reporting:
...For the Journalism competition, entrants may be of any nationality but work must have appeared in a U.S. newspaper published at least once a week, on a newspaper's Web site or on an online news organization's Web site. (Please also see FAQ #10)

That leaves out the folks from Alphaville and the FT.

Also from the FAQ:
28. How is "Pulitzer" pronounced?
The correct pronunciation is "PULL it  sir."
From the Columbia Journalism Review's The Audit blog:
Jesse Eisinger on a Morgan Stanley CDO scandal
If you think, going on six years after the onset of the financial crisis, that we’ve learned about all we’re going to about wrongdoing in the run-up to the global financial crisis… well, you might be a business editor.
So a big tip of the Audit’s green eye shade to that dwindling band of reporters that continues to fight to tell the story of the great financial crisis.

An Audit GFC Hall of Fame would include a few dogged folks like Gretchen Morgenson and Louise Story, Michael Hudson, Mark Pittman, and Bob Ivry—all of whom (except Pittman, much to our regret) understand that there were still critically important stories to tell after 2009—particularly in the absence of any meaningful consequence for the perpetrators.

Jesse Eisinger and Jake Bernstein would be in there too, of course, recipients of the only Pulitzer Prize yet awarded for reporting on the financial crisis (for work published in 2010, it’s worth noting).
And Eisinger reaffirms in a new ProPublica/New York Times piece why the Crisis Club reporters have been right to keep pushing.

One of the most irritating narratives of the post-crisis has been the “hoocoodanode?” line, which says, essentially, that Wall Street was swept up in a mania and that no one knew a catastrophic reckoning was really possible, much less right around the corner. Morgenson recently caught Angelo Mozilo—one of the architects of the housing bubble—testifying that “The cause of the problems of foreclosures is not created by Countrywide, nor M.B.I.A. This is all about an unprecedented, cataclysmic situation, unprecedented in the history of this country.”...MORE