The Press and the World of Money: How the News Media Cover Business and Finance, Panic and Prosperity, and the Pursuit of the American

How does the public obtain business news? How reliable are those sources? Quirt, a freelance financial journalist, addresses these matters in a probing study which supports Galbraith's dictum that financial reporting ``is an area of journalism which was impossibly lousy some years ago and has improved, but it still has some very great flaws.'' Quirt maintains that business journalists are not attentive enough to the long term and also that they are often too ``cozy'' with the community they cover. He is especially critical of the soft reporting on the savings and loan disaster. Tracing the history of business reporting from the 1920s into the electronic age, Quirt provides substantive comments on such institutions as Louis Rukeyser, PBS, the Wall Street Journal and Fortune . This is the best analysis of business journalism in recent years and should be particularly valuable to those interested in media issues. (Sept.)