Journalists in FoxLand

If this century teaches any lesson above all others it is this.

It doesn't pay a decision maker to listen only to what you want to hear.

George W. Bush did. He destroyed himself by it. He refused to take delivery of news from Iraq, or New Orleans, or the housing market, that differed from his world view. He actually seemed to believe he could create his own reality.

We paid for it.

Somehow the lesson wasn't learned. Most of us live in our own versions of FoxLand, hearing only what we want to hear, believing we can pretend reality is as we pretend it to be.

For the ordinary person this is a fairly harmless conceit. If you want to believe your ball team is just on the verge of contention, go ahead. If you want to believe that your favorite celebrity is a really good person, fine. Even political conceits, in time, tend to balance out. You may not be thinking but chances are others are, and it's their changes of mind that determine who will hold power.

The worst place for FoxLand is business. If you buy the spin in your business, or your industry, you will go broke. You will lose it all. You will deserve to.

So the worst thing a journalist can do for a businessman is tell him only what he wants to hear. This is true whether you're covering a vertical beat or the wider world of finance.

Yet that's just what is happening. Wall Street is still living in FoxLand.

This is most evident at CNBC, where anchors like Maria Bartiromo and Maria Caruso Cabrera are still pretending Larry Kudlow's preferences are revealed truth, and that what's in the Street's short-term interests is always the best policy.

Nothing could be further from the truth. 

CNBC is doing business a disservice by repeating its own rationalizations back at it. It does business no good to treat its political shibboleths as holy writ, to ignore crime until it is obvious and then pretend it's an aberration.

It's not. It's the inevitable result of taking cops off the beat. Our streets are safer than in decades in 2010 because we put cops on the street and put criminals behind bars. We need that kind of attitude right now in the business community, where investment bankers and CEOs are taking the journalistic equivalent of crack and pretending it's a fine red wine.

It's not. It's blood. And it's going to be Wall Street's blood on the floor unless they change their attitudes, accept cops in the suites, pass laws to ensure honest dealing, and stop with the spin and gimmickry. It's the only way to regain investor credibility, the only way to get small investor cash back into the market. Cops and jails.

Wall Street crashed the ambulance. Fact. There were no cops telling them no and Wall Street caused the Great Recession. It wasn't poor people buying mortgages they couldn't afford, it was crooks selling them mortgages they knew they couldn't afford, because they could carve them up into CDOs and sell them to other gullible schlubs. Smart money became dumb money.

Wall Street went to Washington for a handout, and then went right back to business as usual, pretending the events of the recent past were some kind of natural disaster, not man-made, and that how business is done did not have to change in any fundamental way. Tax cuts are incentives, regulations are always Big Government, and the solution to economic distress is always to cut someone else's salary, never your own.

It's as though voters elected William H. Taft in 2008, not Barack H. Obama.

If anything is driving the current anger percolating throughout America, it is this effort on the part of our leaders to live in FoxLand, to live in worlds of their imagination, to pretend that the consequences of their actions are always someone else's fault, to refuse to pay any price. Everyone is Bart Simpson and it's not funny any more.

The biggest mistake of our time was the Citizens United decision, the Supreme Court ruling that corporations are not only persons under the law, but entitled to spend pre-tax dollars, in unlimited amounts, buying politicians and determining our laws. It was a decision Taft himself could have written.

It was a mistake because it let businesses, and our political leaders, continue to live in FoxLand. Is there alternative energy competition coming? Pass a law prohibiting it — you can out-spend opponents 1,000 to 1 and no one will call you on it.

When powerful people decide they can live in FoxLand, they commit great crimes, thinking they can always brazen it out. They create Kremlins in Connecticut, Berchtesgardens on Broad St.

BP is presently committing a great crime and trying to brazen it out. The entire oil industry is allowing it to happen, and averting its eyes. They don't think there will ever be a reckoning.

Well, reformers are indeed only morning glories, but the spring is our most violent season. Political tornadoes can sweep through without warning, destroying all within their path.

That's the great danger today, and I'm sorry to say the President has still not gotten ahead of it. Instead he is listening to his inner Plunkitts, like Rahm Emmanuel, pretending that power in the wrong must still be pacified, when it must in fact be confronted.

The question I have is whether the President will fire Emmanuel before it's too late, and bring in someone like Howard Dean, who knows that sometimes real reform is necessary, and that sometimes you have to call evil what it is or be consumed by it. Failure to do so will give power back to those who crashed the ambulance, and America may never recover from that.

The President is being consumed right now by evil he had no hand in making. He's being consumed by the evils of Wall Street, by the evils of the Oil Patch, and by the evils of businessmen who refuse to accept that, sometimes, pay cuts and regulation are the right price to pay in order to prevent something worse.

The current election season is shaping up as a short-term battle between Progressive Anger and Populist Anger, between righteous anger and crazy anger, between the anger that demands change, now, and the anger that scapegoats. In the short term, the political center cannot hold.

There will come a time where, with a nod and a wink, we will need to do ordinary business in an ordinary way. But this is not that time. This is a time for cracking heads and taking names. 

Most especially it's an opportunity for serious online journalists to tell Wall Street what it needs to hear, not what it wants to hear, to gain new credibility from that and to make for themselves the fortunes the "newspaper monopolies" and Rupert Murdoch are so eager to squander. 

Get the story, organize the market, take credit when you're proven right, build your credibility and then kick the Bartiromos, Carusos, and Rick Santellis out on their asses.

Every great problem is an opportunity. Our times are a great opportunity for journalistic entrepreneurs who will tell their readers what they need to know, not just what they want to know, and follow up by organizing the markets, industries and lifestyles they cover.