Journalists jump the gun on praising Biden’s bank bailout
Becket Adams
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Between the years 2015 and 2020, legacy journalism was in a state of constant outrage for Donald Trump’s manhandling of the press.
There were speeches, official statements, entire books even, condemning his repeated attacks on that bold, brave, and beautiful bulwark of our core democracy. Then-CNN chief White House correspondent Jim Acosta’s personal campaign of self-righteous indignation landed him a book deal, which he squandered on the hilariously titled The Enemy of the People: A Dangerous Time to Tell the Truth in America.
“An attack on one is an attack on all,” members of the press would shout following Trump’s anti-media tirades.
Oddly, the spirit of camaraderie once so prevalent, and so well publicized, during the Trump years has all but vanished as various Democratic officials continue to attack journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger, both of whom have reported extensively on Twitter’s pre-Elon Musk relationship with the federal government. At a recent congressional hearing in which Taibbi and Shellenberger appeared as witnesses, Democratic officials berated and slandered the two journalists, taking an unfavorable view of their joint efforts to report on the federal government’s attempts to censor Twitter users via direct coordination with the social media giant. The legacy press’s response to these attacks? A collective yawn.
“I am not exaggerating when I say that you have called before you two witnesses who pose a direct threat to people who oppose them,” Del. Stacey Plaskett (D–VI) said in reference to Taibbi and Shellenberger. “This is unacceptable.”
Oh, look. We’re doing “enemy of the people” again!
Plaskett also characterized Taibbi and Shellenberger as fake news reporters, referring to them as “so-called journalists.”
Elsewhere, Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D–TX) suggested Taibbi and Shellenberger had been paid to provide congressional testimony. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D–FL) likewise suggested something insidious about the fact that Taibbi makes a living from his reporting, as if receiving paid subscriptions for his Substack newsletter implies he is suspect or untrustworthy. Wait until she finds out the New York Times’s annual revenue in 2022 was $2.3 billion.
More remarkable than the half-baked attacks on Taibbi and Shellenberger has been the press’s collective shrug. Nary a word of protest from the reporters who were quick in the Trump era to advertise their solidarity with their fellow journalists.
“These stories are clearly newsworthy,” Taibbi himself remarked, referring to his coverage of the so-called “Twitter Files.” “They are not particularly partisan, the bulk of them. And these attacks on myself and Mr. Shellenberger — it’s the kind of thing that drove the mainstream media wild when Donald Trump was in office. There would have been days and days of headlines of this kind of thing back then. Now, there is total unconcern about it.”
Taibbi added: “Normally, when you get a big story, you want the cavalry to come to help investigate, and nobody did, and I think that’s been a very troubling aspect. This idea of journalists sticking up for one another and sticking up for civil liberties, which used to be a no-brainer issue in this profession, again, it’s gone. It’s just something that has disappeared entirely from the business.”
Yes, it’s very odd that the Jim Acostas and April Ryans of the world haven’t rushed to Taibbi’s defense despite the fact he has been targeted by members of the most powerful deliberative body in the world. It’s probably unrelated to the fact that Taibbi has run afoul of Democrats.
Premature
Let’s maybe pause for a second before we declare President Joe Biden as the savior of the markets and the economy.
Silicon Valley Bank, which was patronized mostly by venture capitalists and tech startups, collapsed last week when depositors sought to withdraw their funds en masse. It’s a genuine scandal, one that can be blamed entirely on gross negligence and mismanagement. In fact, the SVB debacle marks one of the single greatest banking failures since the Great Recession. In December 2022, SVB held $209 billion in total assets. Now it’s getting a bailout.
Under pressure from various Democratic officials, including Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-CA), who has a financial stake in SVB, the White House announced on March 12 that all depositors at the failed bank would have access to their money come Monday morning — as in, the Treasury will backstop all deposits at SVB, not just the deposits of up to $250,000 insured by the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation.
And that’s not all! “The Federal Reserve also created an emergency lending program,” the Washington Free Beacon reports, “to keep other financial institutions afloat should they run low on cash.”
On March 13, exactly one day after the White House announced the bailout, Politico published a report titled “How Biden saved Silicon Valley startups: Inside the 72 hours that transformed U.S. banking.” The report, which bears six bylines, adds: “A historic rescue of a distressed industry came together rapidly, reshaping the government’s relationship with banks in far-reaching ways.”
Can we really say the White House “saved” or reshaped anything in “far-reaching ways” when we’re so close to the event? Apparently so!
At the Washington Post, more of the same. “The 72-hour scramble to save the United States from a banking crisis,” reads the headline of a report bearing three bylines.
“The administration managed to calm markets after a day of turbulence that cut into bank stocks,” it reads. “And it prevented panic that might’ve resulted in countless Americans withdrawing money, which could’ve created damaging instability in the financial system.”
“This is what happens when competent, mature grown-ups are in charge,” ex-CNN correspondent John Harwood, who remains unemployed, said.
The tone and tenor of the reporting, and the victory laps being taken by people such as Harwood, feel just a tad premature. First, we’re not out of the woods just yet — not according to global markets, at least. Remember, Credit Suisse announced on March 15 its plans to borrow an estimated $54 billion to calm investors amid growing concerns about the health of the global banking system, concerns that don’t appear to have been calmed by the “rescue” of SVB.
Second, the immediate victory laps ignore very, very recent history. Lehman Brothers ceased operations on Sept 15, 2008. On Sept. 16, one day after Lehman’s bankruptcy filing, the Federal Reserve bailed out American International Group with an $85 billion two-year loan. Nearly two weeks later, on Sept. 29, the House of Representatives rejected the Emergency Economic Stabilization Act of 2008. The same day, the stock market fell some 777 points, the greatest intraday trading drop at that point in history. Stock market indices worldwide fell by an estimated 10%. Thus began the Great Recession.
The point being: There were at least two weeks between Lehman’s collapse and the date commonly cited as the start of the global financial crisis. Let’s put at least a little distance between the White House’s SVB bailout and the results before we spike the football. It’s clear certain journalists want so badly for Biden to take a rare win, but it couldn’t hurt for them to wait at least 48 hours before popping the champagne.
Becket Adams is a columnist for the Washington Examiner and National Review. He is also the program director of the National Journalism Center.