You are in:
Reporting From Mahogany Ridge
What do you want from your newspapers in a crisis? Sombre, sober analysis - or hysterical raving? If the British press is responding to market demands, then it would appear that we want the latter.
The headlines make turmoil in the markets seem like the first day of the Somme: Carnage. Blood on the trading room floor. Black Holes. Commentary isn't much better. A few weeks ago, pundits in the conservative press denounced Chancellor Alistair Darling as a doom-mongering fool for warning that the financial crisis was the worst the world had faced for sixty years. Now Darling looks like a Pollyanna, and the hard men of the business pages are flapping like a flock of Chicken Lickens, trying to outdo themselves in prophecies of doom.
Here's EURSOC's take on why this might be. For much of the time, business journalists are the poor relations of their colleagues in politics and international news. A posting to the City might mean long claret-soaked lunches with red-faced business veterans, but it also means endless CBI speeches and reporting on dull briefings from the Exchequer's office. In good times, the only things most people want to hear from the City are stock reports, and these days you can get these from the web anyway.
When the action is in Downing Street or Washington, who wants to hear about City intrigue? When terrorists are blowing up trains or crashing aeroplanes into skyscrapers, then who cares about who's taking over from whom at some obscure bank?
War correspondents become household names. Think about the BBC's John Simpson marching into Kabul, claiming to have liberated it. Or the numerous journalists whose reports from Vietnam or the former Yugoslavia were published in books, and became cult classic or even studied in university. Or the specialists, like Robert Fisk, feted in exotic and dangerous parts of the world for explaining their ways to the West, their name becoming a byword for "The Struggle."
Or the various "Scud Studs" of the two Iraq Wars. Women swoon at the sight of these satellite megastars dodging bullets in their flack jackets. No-one is likely to go weak at the knees for a business reporter.
But now... yes, we are looking at a financial crisis, perhaps the worst for several decades. Now, it's the turn of the business hacks. Their editors, many of whom don't have a bloody clue what's going on themselves, free them from their pink pages ghetto and let them loose on the main newspaper. They're on the front pages, the lead bulletins and they have to justify their position. It's carnage out there, and they want you to know that they're in the thick of it, on the front lines, going over the top for their readers. The market, like war, is hell. See, business reporting is glamourous.
What effect this is having on traders - panicky herd animals, rather than strutting big beasts at the best of times - we can only speculate.
Postscript: One place where the financial crisis isn't dominating the headlines is Google News. In an instance of being out-of-step with the rest of the press, this morning the computer-generated headlines service ranked the crisis lower than the Temple stampede in India and the hunt for the Somali pirates who seized a ship carrying arms off the east coast of Africa. The main banking story concerned a city executive who was beaten to death for intervening in a fight in London.
