On Wednesday's CBS Evening News, anchor Katie Couric proclaimed: "The federal commission that investigated the financial meltdown has reportedly concluded it could have been avoided. The New York Times says a report due out tomorrow finds plenty of fault to go around, including mismanagement by corporations and lax regulation by the government."
Couric made sure to point out: "The report also says that contrary to popular belief, the government's push to increase home ownership in this country was not a major contributor to the meltdown." What she failed to mention was that the New York Times article [1] also explained: "The partisan nature of the findings, however, could undermine its impact. Of the 10 commission members, only the six appointed by Democrats...attended the news conference [publicizing the report]." It went on to add: "The four Republican commissioners have prepared two separate dissents; three of them planned to hold a conference call Thursday afternoon."
On Thursday's Early Show, business and economics correspondent Rebecca Jarvis made a slight note of the report's partisan leanings: "This was a panel, chaired by Democrats, looking into the causes behind the financial crisis." However, like Couric, she touted the findings as authoritative: "They found that excessive risk taking, a lack of regulation, was the basic blame behind the crisis."
In their dissenting report [2], the Republican commissioners concluded: "By focusing too narrowly on U.S. regulatory policy and supervision, ignoring international parallels, emphasizing only arguments for greater regulation, failing to prioritize the causes and failing to distinguish sufficiently between causes and effects, the majority's report is unbalanced and leads to incorrect conclusions." Something evidenced by CBS's slanted coverage.
- Kyle Drennen is a news analyst at the Media Research Center. You can follow him on Twitter here. [3]