How Our Gutless Media Helped Trigger the Credit Crisis

By Trudy Lieberman, Columbia Journalism Review. Posted November 20, 2008.

Consumerism, fostered by the press through consumer advice stories, has helped lead people to focus on "me" instead of "we" -- the notion that a lot of little guys are in the same boat. Lenders have reinforced that sensibility, when, for example, they argue before Congress that their practices are necessary so that good credit risks don't pay for bad ones. But if your neighbors default and you don't, what happens to your property values on a street of empty houses? The mindset of "me" makes it difficult to see solutions in terms of "we," or a collective frame that might benefit everyone.

Even if the old consumer movement is gone, the marketplace still has plenty of warts to expose. Many are the same ones that consumer activists of old tried to tackle, like consumer credit and product safety. But there are new ones, such as patient safety and cell-phone marketing. As it was when I began on the consumer beat, little people are fighting the big boys -- little people like Helen Haskell and John James, and the fifty thousand or so others who wrote to the Federal Reserve Board about problems with their credit cards. Haskell, a mother whose teenage son died from a medical error in a hospital, worked for four years to get a bill passed in South Carolina that requires hospitals to provide a way for patients to get prompt attention for medical concerns and requires personnel to wear badges that clearly identify them as staff, interns, residents, or students, so families know whom they're dealing with. James, who is from Texas and who also lost a son to a medical error, is pushing the Institute of Medicine to write a patients' bill of rights. The first step, he says, is to educate people, a role the consumer press once played.

James can use the Internet now to organize a letter-writing drive, but he still needs journalists to reflect on a hospital's mistakes and help people see the problem in the larger context of an unsafe system. The thousands who wrote to the fed still need good reporters to dig out the unsavory lending practices in their communities and show how they have damaged the public good. That kind of reporting may prompt government agencies to act to on behalf of everyone. Who knows? An energized media might even spark a fourth consumer movement that will once again try to address the imbalance between buyers and sellers.

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