"Will the Fed's move signal a determined effort by policymakers around the world to avoid economic catastrophe?" asked The Independent of London last week. "Or is it a sign of panic which indicates that central bankers have lost control of events? There is no better place right now than Davos, with its extraordinary concentration of brain power, wealth and government muscle, to answer these questions."
Or so the media wholeheartedly believes.
As they do each year, scores of journalists and bloggers maxed out their expense accounts last week and headed to the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, in the hopes of sharing shrimp with Al Gore and gawking at Bill Gates. (Looking for movie stars is so 2006.) But this time, they set off with a renewed sense of earnestness and a new justification: to crack the code of our cracking economy. As The New York Times gushed in one of its reports, "This year, the World Economic Forum is actually going to be about the world economy."
Hip, hip, hooray.
So what does that mean for the coverage? Is Davos, as The Independent declared, really the best place to gauge the future of the economy? We would argue no.
Let's look at the reporting. As countless missives told us, many movers and shakers heard the news of Ben Bernanke's historic rate cut as they arrived at the snow-filled ski resort. (Tidbits about the weather, particularly about the amount of snow that has or has not fallen, is de rigueur when reporting from Davos.) This resulted in lots of stories quoting lots of "big" names saying lots of obvious things. "Fear of a U.S. recession is in the air," Jürgen Grossmann, CEO of Germany's RWE AG, told Bloomberg Television. "Obviously, that is dampening the mood." Obviously. Then there's this piece of insight from Kevin Kelly, CEO of headhunter Heidrick & Struggles International Inc., who told BBC News that the Fed's action was "long overdue." Thanks, Kevin.
We don't mean to be too hard on the quotemeisters; after all, how thoughtful can you be when cornered by a jet-lagged reporter who has only a few hours, if not minutes, to fill his Davos reporting or blogging quota? Still, it's a bit mind-boggling that journalists, and everyone else for that matter, are so eager to hear the prognostications of the Davos elite-arguably the same group that helped us land in our economic predicament in the first place. Among the media, The Wall Street Journal was one of the few outlets to note that irony: "Of course, most of the Davos crowd got the economy wrong last January-not a great return on the ticket price of Sfr20,000 [$18,090], on top of the 40,000-franc membership fee," it intoned in a Davos preview story.
The reporting media, of course, doesn't pay those steep fees, but attending Davos is not cheap. Indeed, the BBC came under fire in British newspapers last year for spending £50,000 ($97,800) to send 37 journalists to the confab. But even in these times of cost cutting, big media remains undeterred in its coverage, with everyone from Forbes to the Journal to the BBC to The Times offering Davos blogs (which compete with the World Economic Forum's own Davos blog, not to mention its Webcasts, podcasts and vodcasts.) On its "Davos Diary" blog, The Times boasts that it and the International Herald Tribune sent a team of eight reporters and editors to the event; business columnist Floyd Norris is also there, as is op-ed writer Thomas Friedman, a fixture on the Davos scene and a panel moderator.
What the Gray Lady and other outlets spend on all this coverage-and what they get in return-isn't very clear. Perhaps the keen press interest is a holdover from the old days, when Brangelina gave the event a Hollywood sheen. This year, as the media has told us again and again, that star power is gone and the talk has turned serious. But don't worry. You can still find out whether it snowed in Davos today.
Yvette Kantrow is executive editor of The Deal.