We've dissed the news media at every opportunity because they failed so miserably to report on the problems that have caused the economy to implode. Newspapers like The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times should have known better all along, but instead they served up the kind of drivel that reads like rewritten press releases from the Government and the Federal Reserve. Even now, reporters seem to be having trouble choking out the R-word, since the severe slowdown that has all but asphyxiated the economy is still not 'official.' 'The ill-informed tout the liars,' is how Gary North characterizes this benighted relationship between politicians and the news media. Thus do we read, on the front page of the Journal last week, the results of a softball interview with the former Fed chairman in which he calls his critics 'unfair.' We have inferred that it is mainstream critics that he was referring to, but if he were to browse the archives of the subterranean newsletter world, his feelings would really be hurt. An Embarrassment We don't think much of Mr. Greenspan ourselves, since it seems almost beyond dispute that the banking system's dire troubles are largely attributable to the wantonly reckless monetary policies he pursued, and to his apparently egregious misunderstanding of basic economics. Will history see it that way? There is that chance, since, with regard to the severity of this economic downturn, even if the mainstream media don't yet 'get it,' their not-yet-ready-for-prime-time counterparts in the newsletter business were gimlet-eyed all along. And while Mr. Greenspan's serious professional shortcomings may not be searchable in the fawning coverage he received in New York Times et al., they are voluminously documented on the World Wide Web by legions of observers who saw it all coming. As a result, far
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