By now it's old news to any reasonably critical observer that corporate outlets' "business reporters failed to see the crisis in the mortgage and credit markets as it brewed and bubbled," as former City Limits editor Alyssa Katz puts it (CJR.org, 9/14/09), but Katz also gives props to others who noticed how "evidence of its unsustainability was plain to see for those who chose to look":

The fact is, and as immodest as it may seem to say, independents were repeatedly ahead of the curve on covering the mortgage and real estate bubble and in connecting the dots between vital elements of the bigger story—especially the links between predatory and lending and the metastasizing mortgage-backed securities market.

In 2002, the Nation warned that the mortgage-backed securities market’s bottomless appetite for subprime mortgages was financing an epidemic of destructive lending. In 2003, Southern Exposure exhaustively documented Citigroup’s move into the mass production of high-interest loans designed to drain borrowers' meager wealth. In 2005, Mother Jones assigned me to find out why the streets of Cleveland were lined with vacant houses. A reasonable question, and I found the answers on the Wall Street credit securities market. Indeed, all through this period, alt-weeklies told tales found in living rooms and legal services offices of homeowners who had believed a mortgage broker’s misleading sales pitch and wound up facing foreclosure.

Examining "the fact" that "independent journalists exposed the dimensions of the problem with a depth and timeliness that mainstream news organizations simply and regrettably did not match," Katz thinks "it's not about being better journalists; it is about being tuned to a different audience and set of interests." Read FAIR's magazine Extra!: "Busted Bubble: The Press Fell Down on the Job on Housing Prices" (11–12/08) by Veronica Cassidy.

Presenting yet another example of corporate media failure to grasp the concept of "Adjusted for Inflation," Kevin Drum (MotherJones.com, 7/26/09) has written up a Washington Post piece in which "David Brown says that as treatment for heart attacks has gotten better, it's also gotten more expensive":

"Over the same period, the charges for treating a heart attack marched steadily upward, from about $5,700 in 1977 to $54,400 in 2007 (without adjusting for inflation)."

I continue not to understand why anyone would write this. Why not this instead?

"Over the same period, adjusted for inflation, the charges for treating a heart attack marched steadily upward, from about $20,000 in 1977 to $54,400 in 2007."

Technically, Brown's wording is correct. But it's not helpful, since most people don't have even a vague notion of how much cumulative inflation there's been since 1977. The revised wording, however, is helpful: It gives people a correct impression of how much more we spend treating heart attacks these days. Namely, two to three times as much as 30 years ago.

And Drum maintains "this wasn't just a slip of the keyboard. Brown and his editor obviously made a deliberate decision to use nominal figures even though this doesn't give the average reader a very good idea of how much costs have actually risen."