Main Street

Where’s the Lehman Brothers Scandal?

Admittedly we haven’t been all over this one to date, but this is interesting. Lehman Brothers appears to have actually broken the law:

[A] blockbuster 2,200 page report on Lehman Brothers by a court-appointed examiner shows Lehman Brothers executives moving $50 billion in toxic assets off-balance-sheet to deceive investors about its financial health.

So that’s big, right? Only,

Say, we just learned about a $50 billion fraud on Thursday. Think there might be some newsworthy follow-ups here? Actually there are, and both The New York Times and Wall Street Journal have them, but they stuff them inside.

–snip–

Somehow the Times thought more people would care about Sorkin’s scoop on a $3 billion deal for Tommy Hilfiger or that it was more important than an auditor approving accounting fraud. They don’t and it’s not.

Look, I know that Lehman collapsed a year and a half ago, but this is a major story—one that finally gets awfully close to putting the crimes in the crisis. I’ll go ahead and say it: If you’ve wanted to know about the Valukas report and its implications, you’ve been better served by reading Zero Hedge and Naked Capitalism than you have The Wall Street Journal or New York Times. This on the biggest financial news story of the week—and one of the biggest of the year. These papers have hundreds of journalists at their disposal. The blogs have one non-professional writer and a handful of sometime non-pro-journalist contributors.

When they’re confronted with things like this, the traditional media tends to explain that it just so happened that people weren’t interested in Wall Street crime, they were interested in the latest celebrity break-up. But when they don’t make the news about Wall Street available to begin with, it’s really not a fair test. “People weren’t interested in the thing we didn’t bring to their attention” isn’t an adequate defense for burying a story.

Tags: Wall Street