Category Archives: Media watch

Frontline Takes Issue With Our Critique of Its “Money, Power & Wall Street” Shows

I received this e-mail last week. I will issue my rebuttal Tuesday during the day. Check back in then!

Adam Davidson Parrots Disinformation as He Extols Rule by the Top 0.1%

Adam Davidson is moving up in the world. He has gone from fellating the 1% to the top 0.1%.

New York Times Yet Again Demonstrates Its Fealty to the 1%

I got a message from a regular reader:

Frontline’s Astonishing Whitewash of the Crisis

Several of my savviest readers wrote expressing disappointment and consternation with the Frontline series on the crisis, “Money, Power, and Wall Street.” The first two parts of the four part series have been released, and it’s probably safe to say that this program is far enough along to be beyond redemption.

On Journalists Moonlighting as Big Ticket Speakers for Financial Firms

Paul Starobin has a useful article at Columbia Journalism Review on the way some high profile journalists receive large speaking fees for appearing before financial services industry audiences, most often conferences for investors, when they write about the same industry.

Roger Lowenstein’s Disgraceful Propagandizing via “Bernanke as Hero” Piece

As Winston Churchill pointed out, history is written by the victors. The big end of finance, having won decisively in the global financial crisis, is in the process of rewriting history to suit its liking. The cover story in the current Atlantic by Roger Lowenstein on Ben Bernanke, titled simply, “The Hero,” is a classic example of this type of revisionist history.

Push for Bankster-Friendly Rep from the Upper East Side Carolyn Maloney Over Uppity Maxine Waters to Head House Financial Service Committee

Even though the odds are against the Democrats retaking the House of Representatives, the jockeying in case that event takes place is already underway. An effort is afoot to push aside the Democratic heir presumptive of the powerful House Financial Services leadership, Maxine Waters, and install the representative from the Upper East Side’s Silk Stocking district, Carolyn Maloney.

What’s striking about the effort to take down Waters is the thinly disguised racism.

Robert Cowley, 2nd Baron Ardwhallan: an Unauthorized Web Biography (II)

By Richard Smith, spelunker of the Web. We started Robert Cowley’s web bio here and this is the second installment. We will be in Mayfair, London, or on the Gold Coast of Australia, and the story involves a dead Daily Mail journalist, a great racing driver, and a bad racing driver: a very bad one, […]

Reader Query: What Sleazy Con Artist Does the Obama “Greatness” Campaign Evoke?

Just when you think things have gotten as bad as they can, whether in matters of great import of small, they manage to get worse. I should be inured to relentless Obama propagandizing by now, but to make sure the public doesn’t miss the fact that they are lucky enough to be governed by someone possessed of true genius, the pre-election PR is now taking on heavy-handed cult of personality overtones. As if Obama has enough in the way of personality for anyone to notice.

Robert Cowley, 2nd Baron Ardwhallan: an Unauthorized Web Biography (I)

By Richard Smith, proud scion of a 5,000-year-old line of soot-smeared metal bashers, (purportedly). An early version of this post was born prematurely, and then, since blogging is more forgiving than obstetrics, hurriedly stuffed back into the womb by the flustered midwife. This is the fully developed version.

Robert Cowley, aka Earl Cowley, aka 2nd Baron Ardwhallan, aka Sir Robert Cowley, aka the Right Honorable Robert Cowley, is a faker, fantasist, social climber, fraudster and con man from Australia.

I suppose I could stop there, but it wouldn’t be much of a biography, and Cowley has such a shadowy and fantastical pedigree that it would be a shame not to record some of it: the traces he leaves aren’t always durable, but they are always vivid while they last.

Due Diligence Fail from BBC World Business

By Richard Smith, who is easily distracted.

I promised in my last meander, about international scammers and media screwups, that my next post was going to be set in Australia. But I found this little gem, while looking for something else, and so the exotic locations this time are Colombia and Vancouver (the big Canadian Vancouver, not the little Vancouver in Washington, US, which, as it happens, might also get a look-in in a future post in this rambling series).

But this one is still about scammers and media screwups, so we are still on track, sort of. Here’s BBC World Business giving Rahim Jivraj an opportunity to puff his pump-and-dump Colombian mining company, Mercer Gold.

Satyajit Das: Pravda The Economist’s Take on Financial Innovation

By Satyajit Das, derivatives expert and the author of Extreme Money: The Masters of the Universe and the Cult of Risk Traders, Guns & Money: Knowns and Unknowns in the Dazzling World of Derivatives – Revised Edition (2006 and 2010)

In the old Soviet Union, Pravda, the official news agency, set the standard for “truth” in reporting. Discriminating readers needed to be adroit in sifting the words to discern the facts that lay beneath. Readers of The Economist’s “Special Report on Financial Innovation” (published on 23 February 2012) would do well to equip themselves with similar skills in disambiguation.