MAIN STREAM MEDIA: MISSING IN ACTION?
Last Friday the web site of station WJLA-TV, the Washington DC affiliate of ABC, carried a routine sounding story [1] about how delisting stocks can hurt investors. An attentive reader might have stumbled on these remarkable statements about halfway down.
“Fannie Mae, which finances one of every five home loans in the United States, has been out of compliance with New York Stock Exchange listing standards since 2004– the last time it filed a quarterly earnings report. Yet NYSE hasn’t delisted the stock.”
“Federal regulators in 2004 accused Fannie Mae of serious accounting problems and earnings manipulation to meet Wall Street targets, and the Securities and Exchange Commission ordered the company to restate earnings back to 2001.”
Say what?? This sounds like a story the size of the Enron scandal, but it certainly hasn’t achieved the same status on network television and other mass media. What’s going on? Read the rest of this entry »
