The title is a misnomer. This is really a history of financial journalism, going back to Ida Tarbell and Standard Oil. There's not enough on the Financial Crisis of 2008. The lookback is fine, especially on muckraking, and if you're interested in the early days of the WSJ, Fortune, Forbes, BusinessWeek, and CNBC, it's all here. When the author gets down to brass balls, he's got his sword out for Jamie Dimon, Sandy Weill, and Eric Holder, and rightfully so. For a much clearer look at the massive mortgage fraud itself, read Chain of Title by David Dayen.

Quotes: "The Community Reinvestment act, mistakenly assigned blame by conservatives as a cause of the mortgage crisis."

"As regulation left the field, journalism did, too."

"The very nature of stories that frame issues in terms of risk to a particular facet of the financial system render them of limited use, because they fail to take into account the extent to which fraud played a role in undermining financial models. The view is top-down when the reporting needs to be from the bottom up."

"A reading of Wall Street profile stories shows them to be so deeply embedded in Wall Street values and expectations that they actually contributed to the atmosphere stoking predatory lending."

"Abandonment of muckraking and public-interest reporting left it dangerously detached from the realities of the subprime industry and the sweeping changes overtaking the financial system. Conventional business reporting did not grasp financial lawlessness on this scale."

"With federal regulators defanged, Congress compliant, the White House complicit, and a financial sector run amok, who was fighting for the public?"

"The press presented homeowners as being just as culpable for the housing bubble and fraud as the financial institutions that aggressively lent to them. Relatively few focused on why households took on so much debt in the first place."

"The Obama administration and its attorney general, Eric Holder, must bear primary responsibility for the inexplicable absence of a single criminal prosecution to be brought against any major figure either among mortgage lenders or on Wall Street. As we're learning, only an indictment has the power to change a narrative. Civil settlements won't do." ( )

Another fine addition to the financial crisis bookcase (not shelf!). Starkman takes us all the way back to the early muckrakers and writes a glowing tribute to Ida Tarbell and her exposes on Standard Oil. His history of the Wall St Journal and of Dow and Jones and many other writers, editors, and personalities are well written.

Of the recent crisis, he faults most of the media for being asleep at the wheel and for ignoring the illegal and immoral mortgage boiler rooms, and for focusing on the CEOs instead of on their heinous ties to the sub prime bottom feeders. This is for the most part, he feels, caused by the collapse of print journalism at exactly the wrong time, and on the de-emphasis of the "long story". Now news is produced on a "hamster wheel" and designed to keep churning out food for the voracious on line outlets.

The best chapters deal with individual great reporting efforts by Susan Faludi (who knew???) and Michael Hudson. ( )