From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the media.

Brooke Gladstone is out this week.

I'm Bob Garfield.

On August 9th, the Dow Jones Industrial Average plunged 387 points on worries about defaults on so-called subprime mortgage loans.

The panic was palpable.

Good evening. In plain English, the wings fell off Wall Street earlier today. And as the Dow Jones

387 points, problems in the subprime mortgage market appeared to go into Asian and European markets

fell overnight. This after yesterday's credit crisis sent the Dow down 387 points.

Financial stories have a hard time reaching the headlines, but sometimes it's easy.

Dow up? Good. Dow down? Bad. Sure enough, a few days later, when central banks intervened and the U.S.

Fed cut interest rates, stocks wereed, the media expressed relief,

and went on to Browner pastures. But in failing to see the crisis coming and in quickly losing

interest was the media coverage of the subprime fiasco subprime? Dean Baker, co-director of the

Center for Economic and Policy Research, thinks so.

The breathless reporting on market gyrations, he says, overshadowed the underlying problems.

Well, basic story of a subprime mortgage are that these are people getting mortgages who don't have

good credit ratings. And what's going on is there's been a real explosion in the

issuance of subprime mortgages over the last five or six years. There have been subprime for

sub-time, but they were generally a very small segment, two, three, four percent of the market.

That just exploded so that subprime mortgages account for 25% of all mortgages in 2006.

But it was no secret before two weeks ago when the Dow Jones went on the skids.

Where was the reporting about the danger of subprime mortgages till now?

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