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

I'm Brooke Gladstone.

And I'm Bob Garfield.

We got to work on Monday knowing well that the lipstick week was over.

This time the news was serious.

The OTM staff went about our business of looking for news organizations to blame. But as we poured over the exhaustive coverage, we thought, you know, these stories are really good, really thorough, really clear. Mortgage-backed securities based on mortgages that never should have been underwritten, creating a house of cards, now utterly flattened.

Could it be that we were going to have to bite our tongues and actually praise the media?

Well, yes and no.

In some way, the circumstances reminded us of 9-11, heroic, all-consuming coverage of the devastation with not too much attention to the so-called root causes.

At the Columbia Journalism Review, however, business press critic Dean Starkman was paying

lots of attention to root causes. Dean, welcome to the show.

Nice to be here, Bob.

Let's start with the praise.

I look at the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, the Washington Post.

Incredible.

Yeah, it is kind of heroic in a lot of ways.

This is a full-scale emergency, and they're acting like it.

This morning I've been thinking that being a business press critic right now is sort of like being a critic of the London Fire Department during the Blitz.

The city's on fire and they're scrambling as fast as possible

and that's all you can do at this point.

But while the firefighters are scrambling around going from exploded house to exploded house,

what isn't getting done?

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