Financial Reporting

Walking back to the Sheraton Hotel at which the members of the Reynolds Institute are housed following the presentation by Andrew Leckey, president of the Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism at the Cronkite School, several of the fellows and I got into a discussion concerning the watchdog role of the press.

Leckey had spoken on the importance for the modern journalist to understand and mine the business of the financial world in reporting on current trends and events. It seems that this is elemental to the job of the investigative reporter in an era of high flying and crashing finance. And yet, it also seems sadly lacking in so many areas. Bernie Madoff managed to perpetuate a rather transparent and trite con on the entire financial world for the last 15 years without anyone recognizing the mammoth Ponzi scheme he and his cohorts had constructed. Ponzi schemes have been

It seems that the journalism culture is failing their trust in business reporting. Journalist are more then informational transcribers. Traditionally, their role is that of society's guardian. Truly each citizen is responsible for being cognizant of the consequences of their own decisions but for the average man, the decision made must be on the bases of the quality of the information provided by the nation's media. There has to be some faucet of critical information available in order for sound decisions to be reached.

Critical to current trends in the financial world is the free and sound flow of financial reporting and in the case of Madoff and in the case of the proliferation of PayDay loan sharks, the reporting and investigation by the nation's media seems to be sorely lacking.

If the credo of the nation's free press is to give voice to the voiceless, something seems amiss in the high finance and low financial insight of this media.