Libor? What Libor? TV News Largely Ignores Banking Scandal

Sometimes fake-news host Jon Stewart is a better source of banking news than his counterparts in broadcast journalism.

Since June 27, the Libor rate-fixing scandal has cost Barclays $450 million in fines to British regulators, caused the resignations of its chairman and its chief executive and focused regulatory scrutiny on other big banks, including JPMorgan Chase (JPM) and Citigroup (NYSE: C). But viewers of ABC's World News and NBC's Nightly News haven't heard anything about those events, according to a report Tuesday by the nonprofit website Media Matters for America.

Regular People readers will recall that Stewart, host of the late-night satire The Daily Show, devoted the first five minutes of one program last month to Libor, calling it "international banking conspiracy 37." But Media Matters says that the more, er, serious evening news programs on ABC and NBC have ignored the main scandal roiling the banking world this summer.

An ABC spokesman declined to comment, and an NBC spokeswoman did not respond to a request for comment.

CBS's main news program devoted more than 5 minutes to the Libor news in the first sixteen days after Barclays was fined for manipulating the London interbank offered rate, according to Media Matters. But the CBS Evening News did not mention the scandal again during the second half of July.

Tuesday was the second time that Media Matters had released findings on the amount of coverage the television news shows were giving to the Libor scandal. After its first report on July 13, Washington Post media critic Erik Wemple exhorted news organizations to "get on it," giving them nine reasons to start paying attention to Libor. (Reason No. 9: "It's mid-July. What else are you going to cover?")

Mainstream cable news programs seem to be paying a little bit more attention to Libor and its fallout; CNN devoted 22 minutes to it during the second half of July, compared with less than five minutes between June 27 and July 12. Both Fox and MSNBC increased their coverage to about five minutes each during the period between July 13 and July 28, compared with about a minute each in the first half of July.

Eric Boehlert, a senior fellow at Media Matters, called the statistics the latest evidence that "the press, TV news in particular, have done a consistently poor job covering the banking failure since 2008 and really explaining some of the horrendous wrongdoing that has been done."

In an interview last week, before Media Matters published its second set of findings, Boehlert said, "There is a tendency to cut the banking industry too much slack. There is this assumption that they know what they are doing. … Particularly since 2008, I don't think they have been as aggressive as they should have been in terms of giving the extraordinary wrongdoing and failings that we have seen the coverage it deserves."

Media Matters says it compiled its statistics by searching transcripts and reviewing video of the various news programs for various keywords relating to Barclays and Libor. The blog couldn't help a bit of snark, noting Tuesday, "ABC, NBC, CBS, Fox News, MSNBC and CNN spent 44 minutes combined on the Libor scandal during their evening programming from June 27 to July 28. By contrast, these same outlets devoted nearly 65 minutes to stories about sharks for only the first sixteen days of that period."