Sensational Economic Stories Taper Off

"I think that one of the things in this crisis all along has been it's like a mystery novel," David Wessel, the economics editor for The Wall Street Journal, told The Observer last Friday. "Every time you turn the page you're in a new chapter, and you're being introduced to new characters and new plots that you hadn't expected. It's hard to understand what's going on."

That was what the coverage of the Bear Stearns implosion was about: a scramble to understand.

Some pulled it off magnificently, if belatedly; others opted for the comfort of hyperbole; all were, for a time at least, rolled by the Bush administration.

To simply leaf through the headlines of the different sections of the March 18 Journal was to lose all faith in the American way of doing things. The terrorists must've been kicking themselves for not being the first to think of subprime-mortgage-backed securities as a sure way to cripple the U.S. The sky was falling; not a drill this time.

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Read about how newspaper editors are defending their coverage of the mortgage crisis.