From WNYC in New York, this is NPR's On the Media. I'm Bob Garfield.

And I'm Brooke Gladstone. What an awful week this was for our economy, again. On Thursday, the Dow Jones Industrial Average set another new low for the year. The S&P Index dropped to its lowest point since 1997, new claims for unemployment

soared, consumer prices sagged, and reporters labored to keep track of it all. Awful, and yet familiar to

longtime financial reporter Michael Lewis, he's the editor of a new book called Panic, the story of

modern financial insanity out on

December 1st. It looks back on five financial panics over the past 20 or so years, as well as the

reporting done before, during, and after each meltdown. Compiling a book like this, Lewis says,

is a lesson in pattern recognition.

The pattern tends to mirror the moods of the markets.

So when the market is going up, regardless of however insane the reason for it going up,

the patter in the press, is very boosterish, optimistic, going along for the ride.

Things go bad. The first thing that happens

is there were criminations in the press. But then the press turns to these pieces written

with the Olympian detachment after everything's come to grief. We always knew this was rotten.

And you can't go back before the event and find anybody saying, very seldom anyway, that it was rotten.

There's a lack of perspective to the first kind of coverage and a lack of really deep honesty to the second kind of coverage.

In addition, people, when they're describing money, there's so much mystique around it and so much complexity has been added to the world of money.

And everybody's afraid of not seeming to understand it. Everybody's afraid of asking the simple

question. Like, why does that make sense? Or could you explain that in English?

Is this level of complexity new? Yes. It's gotten more and more and more complex over the last 30 years.

It's harder and harder to really unpack it for a reader. And I've tried, you know, so I know.

And I think the journalism for the last six or eight months of this crisis has been pretty magnificent.

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