Asking the Dumb Questions

David Carr of The New York Times looks at the media’s role in the current financial crisis and touts the importance of asking so-called stupid questions in Sunday's “Daring to Say Loans Made No Sense." Carr writes, “Sometimes, if you want the real answer, you have to ask a dumb question.” In this case, the question, which came from radio producer Alex Blumberg and led to a one-hour radio special called "The Giant Pool of Money," was: “Why are they lending money to people who can’t afford to pay it back?”
Carr also spoke with Andrew Leckey, director of the Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism for the piece.
Carr writes:

After large-scale financial disasters, the press is usually criticized — often justly — for ignoring the problem, but it’s hard to make that case with the subprime mess. If no one saw this coming, they were not looking.
“This has been a very slow-moving train wreck,” said Andrew Leckey, director of the center for business journalism at Arizona State University. “But it came wrapped in the warm feelings of home ownership while the executives behind it used obfuscation and a lack of transparency to lie about how deeply they were in the subprime business.”

Read the complete story here.