The roundtable on Sunday's Meet the Press (2/1/09) sure didn't look promising: Republican flat tax enthusiast Steve Forbes, former McCain economic adviser Mark Zandi and CNBC reporter Erin Burnett. It was Burnett, though, who delivered a head-scratching defense of the $18 billion bonuses recently doled out at Wall Street firms (many of which are still standing thanks only to the government's multi-billion dollar TARP bailout).

As Burnett explained, the populist anger was misplaced (see bold):

BURNETT: I understand the outrage, and you understand the populism. There are, though--well, how should we say this? The taxpayer money is not being used to pay the bonuses. I think people could understand if you work for a company--right? If the three us worked for a company, your guests, and I lost $10 billion but Steve [Forbes] over there, he made a billion dollars. So overall the company actually loses money, but Steve went and did his very darndest for that company and he made money. So should he be paid for his work? That's essentially what we're talking about here. And reasonable people could argue about this, but many reasonable people would conclude, yes, he should be paid for that. And I think, David, you've raised a fair point, which is maybe it's the whole use of the word "bonus."

GREGORY: Mm-hmm.

BURNETT: If you explained to people this is how they are compensated, that might make a difference. But there is also a fundamental misunderstanding. The taxpayer money isn't being taken and paid out in the form of bonuses. It goes in a, a separate pool, shall we say, a separate account for banks. So maybe people don't care about that distinction, but it is there.

Really? That's just a "separate pool"  money? As Adam Green and Media Matters point out, that sure doesn't seem to be the case. The original New York Times report (1/29/09) and several others rounded up by Media Matters quote several experts making exactly the opposite point-- that without the bailout funds, bonuses would have been much lower.

This isn't the first time Burnett's raised some eyebrows; she once warned that critics of China should go easy, since safe food and lead-free toys are likely to cost more. And a Today show report she did cheering the soaring Dow and the lamenting the tax burden of the super-wealthy earned her an "attagirl" from Rush Limbaugh.

Discussing the failed auto bailout on CBS Evening News (12/12/08):

KATIE COURIC: And it's almost, meanwhile, turning to Washington, Bob, impossible to figure out just what happened to this auto bailout in the Senate. There's all this finger pointing going on. What is your take? Can you explain it to us in simple terms?

BOB SCHIEFFER: I think frankly what happened, Katie, is that this is overwhelmingly unpopular, bailing out these auto companies with the public in general. And every poll suggests that. These leaders of the auto industry came to town first in their jet planes and now you find that the members of the union are not willing to consider a pay cut for the next two years. It was a very easy vote for Republicans to vote to block this thing. They were just doing what their constituents across the country kind of wanted them to do. That may not be the right thing, but I think in the end that's really what did them in.

Every poll suggests that bailing out the auto industry is overwhelmingly unpopular? Actually, no--really, the polls are all over the map on the auto bailout, ranging from a CNN/Opinion Research poll (12/1-2/08) where the public is opposed 61 percent to 36 percent to an L.A. Times/Bloomberg poll (12/6-8/08) finding 47 percent to 42 percent support for a bailout. One of the polls that did not find an auto rescue to be overwhelmingly unpopular was CBS's own--the network's December 4-7 poll found 45 percent approving of a bailout and 44 percent disapproving. Guess Schieffer doesn't read his network's own polls--or doesn't trust them.

The corporate media has more or less been on the same page in applauding Obama's cabinet picks so far--"He's been pragmatic in choosing pragmatists," as the Washington Post editorial page cheered on November 28. There's been occasional criticism of Obama's choices as being too progressive, as when the L.A. Times (12/5/08) attacked the idea of Rep. Xavier Bercerra as U.S. trade representative, declaring that Obama "should break his promises and appoint a free-trader as trade representative."

So it was refreshing to see Michael Hirsh's piece in Newsweek wondering why left-leaning Columbia economist Joseph Stiglitz hasn't been in the mix:

But lost amid the cascades of ticker tape is the fact that, astonishingly, you didn't hire the one expert who's been right about the financial crisis all along--and whose Nobel Prize-winning ideas will probably be most central to fixing the global economy.

In Hirsh's mind, Stiglitz has a solid record that would recommend him in the current crisis--namely, that he saw much of it coming, unlike some of Obama's other advisers (specifically media favorite Larry Summers):

Stiglitz, more than anyone on the Washington scene, was the biggest fly in the ointment of "free-market fundamentalism" pressed on the world in the '90s by Summers, Geithner and their mentor, former Treasury secretary Robert Rubin—advice that has now contributed to the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

That perspective was seconded by New York Times columnist Frank Rich on Sunday (12/7/08), who wondered if we are seeing a replay of Kennedy's "best and brightest" team of advisers:

No, it’s the economic team that evokes trace memories of our dark best-and-brightest past. Lawrence Summers, the new top economic adviser, was the youngest tenured professor in Harvard’s history and is famous for never letting anyone forget his brilliance. It was his highhanded disregard for his own colleagues, not his impolitic remarks about gender and science, that forced him out of Harvard’s presidency in four years. Timothy Geithner, the nominee for treasury secretary, is the boy wonder president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. He comes with none of Summers's personal baggage, but his sparkling résumé is missing one crucial asset: experience outside academe and government, in the real world of business and finance. Postgraduate finishing school at Kissinger & Associates doesn’t count.

Summers and Geithner are both protégés of another master of the universe, Robert Rubin. His appearance in the photo op for Obama-transition economic advisers three days after the election was, to put it mildly, disconcerting. Ever since his acclaimed service as treasury secretary in the Clinton administration, Rubin has labored as a senior adviser and director at Citigroup, now being bailed out by taxpayers to the potential tune of some $300 billion. Somehow the all-seeing Rubin didn’t notice the toxic mortgage-derivatives on Citi’s books until it was too late. The Citi may never sleep, but he snored.

Geithner was no less tardy in discovering the reckless, wholesale gambling that went on in Wall Street’s big casinos, all of which cratered while at least nominally under his regulatory watch. That a Hydra-headed banking monster like Citigroup came to be in the first place was a direct byproduct of deregulation championed by Rubin and Summers in Clinton’s Treasury Department (where Geithner also served). The New Deal reform they helped repeal, the Glass-Steagall Act, had been enacted in 1933 in part because Citigroup's ancestor, National City Bank, had imploded after repackaging bad loans as toxic securities in the go-go 1920s.

FAIR has a new Action Alert up about ABC's gross exaggeration of auto worker compensation. Feel free to post messages sent to ABC here--or any responses you get from the network.

Here's the New York Times (11/24/08), reporting the Citigroup bailout:

In tense, round-the-clock negotiations that stretched until almost midnight on Sunday, it became clear that the crisis of confidence had to be defused now or the financial markets could plunge further.

Note the absence of any source here--that's reporter Eric Dash, with the authority of the Times behind him, declaring that it was "clear that the crisis of confidence had to be defused now." This is a striking departure from the paper's typical style, in which assertions are generally sourced to somebody--if only to "officials."

The absence of the usual sourcing suggests that the Times believes that Citicorp's troubles were a crisis too big for its usual journalism: Readers needed to be to be told that the need for immediate action was a fact, not a claim.

If that's the motivation, then the New York Times has it backwards: When a crisis is truly serious, and action or inaction can have catastrophic consequences, it's all the more crucial that readers--which is to say citizens--know where information is coming from, so they can make an informed judgment about what the source's interests are and whether the source's pronouncements have been trustworthy in the past. (Is the source "Citigroup executives" or "government officials," both of whom are mentioned earlier in the paragraph? If so, then the answer to the latter question is clearly no.)

If you believe in journalism, then you believe that times of danger require more journalism, not less.