April
16Bad News, Bad Judgment
Troubled times often trigger troubled behavior. That’s been especially true in the journalistic community of late.It’s hard to explain why the august New York Times would run an op-ed piece that provided a curious rationale for the behavior of Bernard Madoff. Investors weren’t compelled to give money to this Wall Street crook, the piece argued; people actually wanted him — even courted him — to take their money.
The article was written, however, by a Times writer named Daphne Merkin, who would not exactly be expected to have an objective view of this debacle. Merkin’s brother is J. Ezra Merkin, who fed more than $2 billion of clients’ money into the Madoff machine, while collecting some $470 million in fees.
Buried in the fifth paragraph of her op-ed piece, Daphne Merkin blandly acknowledges she has “a sibling who did business with Madoff.” That’s like saying, “I’m a member of the Ponzi family, but that doesn’t influence my views about the family’s business plan.”
The press does not deserve high marks for its coverage of the collapse of the economy, and the Times isn’t helping the cause by running op-ed pieces like Merkin’s.
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