Help Dig Up The Praise That Today's Bailout Bandits Once Received

Over the past few months we've seen the media begin to cast a hairy eye on many of the financial characters it once dubbed as experts, creators of great wealth and oracles of market behavior. Many of these people are now considered the perpetrators of our current financial crisis.

We need your help to collect the heaps of praise that newspapers, magazines and TV news shows doled out when times were good. Now that times are bad, it's even more important to remind ourselves how easily the wool can be pulled over the media's eyes and, consequently, those who consume it.

We want to find laudatory reports on not only the alleged Ponzi fraudsters like Bernie Madoff and Allen Stanford, but also executives like former Merrill CEO John Thain and former top Citigroup adviser Robert Rubin. We need your help to research front-page magazine spreads, fawning TV interviews, and any other gratuitous praise of the perpetrators of this economic meltdown. It doesn't matter how far back you need to go.

Email [e-mail] with the articles you find. Include your name, the date the article was published, and let us know if you would like to remain anonymous.

Some examples of people to start with are John Thain, Robert Rubin, Dick Fuld, John Mack, Ken Lewis, Jacob Ezra Merkin, Vikram Pandit, Allen Stanford, Bernie Madoff and Walter Noel to name a few.

Comments

[johnehoover]

http://businessandmedia.org/articles/2008/20080925124953.aspx

[LafnBacstage]

Come on HP

Aren't you getting lazy by asking your readers do your investigative reporting. What you are asking for is easily found in a one second Google search.

Have your staff get off its tushy and earn their keep.

[Persson4]

Charles Prince Citigroup.­...Also check the tangled web between boards and AIG--

Citi Group---Saudi Prince--six degrees to Osama

[msjimmied]

The run up to the crash of the Nasdaq market is strewn with wonderful examples by a lot of the usual suspects..­.same pattern, no one saw it coming till the cataclysmic end. Kudlow, Cramer all the clowns... and now we still listen to them? We have such short memories.

[JeauxSchmeaux]

Jim Cramer needs to be on this list as well as anyone else from CNBC.

[WallStreetNobody]

How could you forget to list Jimmy Cayne of Bear Stearns? And what about just corporations in general, how about all the fawning over the individual banks and companies like AIG?

[magibrotherhood]

Donald Trump---glorifier of greed

[magibrotherhood]

Andrea Mitchel----g reenspan`s MSM cheerleader wife

[josephXY]

A great and useful idea that really helps to get rid of problems.

When the greatest losers, the biggest failures got su much praise from the media, they
could just as well have worshipped and idolized the really extreme communist revolutionaries
instead. It would have made no difference at all, only in that case people would have known what
they were up to (not just ideologically, but it terms of revolutionary results, implemtented policies
of the old days, haw people were factually affected by them).

I don't like Newsweek, but it currently runs an article on how the rich destroyed their fellows.
The bankers for the rich seeing to it that their clients see the end of their fortune.

It's an idea htat makes the media crisis even more sexy at a time when the level of ad expenses,
the all too apparent uselessness of lots of ad spending, becomes an hot topic for businesses
throughout, assisting in the process of getting rid of problems and nightmares.

[steakman55]

Stan O'Neal, former crook in chief at Merril lLynch

[sas1963]

Awesome idea!

How about, while your at it, look up all the Media Spokespeople (similar to what Jon Stewart has been doin) and point out how they were advising us just last year about our money....

That's the true pisser... The media is supposed to tell the truth, isn't it? I don't buy that they had 'the wood pulled over their eyes'... they hired 'experts' whom they obviously didn't vet properly..­. I'm wondering when the first lawsuit against CNN or NBC is going to occur alleging that they relied on information given by their pet 'expert' to make purchases.­..

Good luck with your research!

[hoopesaz]

Don't forget the folks who twisted the arms of banks in to lax lending standards (Barney Frank and crew).

[ThePhantom]

Oh, they don't want to discuss that. Ever

[cordyc]

More accurately Phil Gramm and Alan Greenspan. The major champions of deregulation, freewheeling capital markets, and the WMD of derivatives.

[Bitsko]

Not praise for a bailout bandit, but I came across this:

“We’re perfectly happy to just earn commissions on the trades.” --Bernie Madoff in 2001

[tom928]

It's important to mark the culture of the preceding period that led to the praise of these criminals. A document of some kind, perhaps incorporating all of these images into a book on the subject, would be important to have the next time the culture begins to forget where this behavior leads to.

[tom928]

A fantastic idea.