The fire sale of Bear Stearns to JP Morgan this past weekend is the “Brittany Spears” event of the week. The wave of media has crashed over all the principles. I’m certain Eliot Spitzer is grateful for the relief this event provides him as the media scurries off en masse to cover the newer, hotter, better, sexier story. Experts proliferate on every tv station, armed with the powerful wisdom of hindsight. The incendiary words “government bailout,” are bandied about, looking, I suppose, to rile up the masses into a lather. It’s pretty easy to come down hard against the idea of “rewarding a private industry guilty of egregiously bad judgment and business practices.” But what does that really do towards solving the problem? I don’t know why that is always the approach the media takes with every news story, but this “chicken little – the sky is falling” approach certainly seems intentional to me. Obviously, it sells papers and draws viewers.
If I owned a media outlet, I might try a new approach. I might try to allay the fears of my readers/listeners. How? For example I might tie this story to a report about what happened when the US government bailed out the Savings and Loans twenty some years ago. It is my understanding that the Federal government actually made money on that bailout. Eventually, it sold the properties it took over at a profit. It took a few years to accomplish, and God knows, in a few years this story will be a thousand stories behind us in our rear view mirror, with nary a reporter in sight to record the final fallout of that hot story of March 2008. It seems with the pace of today’s world, that nothing in the past brings any relevant weight to the present. Already there are media sharks searching for the next hot story. What we lose sight of in this media driven society is that these are more than stories and sound bytes. They are “events” with ties to the past and ties to the future. They live on long after the media spotlights are dimmed. It’s called “perspective” and it sure looks like we don’t have any.
By Myron Gushlak
