Lobby Level: Business Week Takes on the Banks
Advertising everywhere is down. In many places, it’s out. Traditional print and broadcast media, whose lifeblood is generally advertisers, are taking it on the chin, not only because of inhospitable economic conditions, but also because of earth-shattering, structural secular change, i.e. people don’t consume media as they used to so traditional media is not as valuable as it used to be.
Now, there’s a third strike that media brands with cajones self-inflict. Their editorial goes after their advertisers with reportorial impunity, which doesn’t exactly earn the publication brownie points as the diminishing ad budgets get reallocated.
We wonder two things in light of the courageous piece Business Week has that drills in to the depths of how and why the foreclosures phenomenon has become the financial equivalent of post-Katrina New Orleans. One, is how many of the companies on the list below will come around to advertising in McGraw-Hill publications in the near [or maybe far] future?
We actually thought the lobbying world had cleaned itself up a bit a few years ago.
Equally eye-opening is the amount that financial firms lobbies funnel to the campaigns of targeted elected officials.
Still, this brings us to our next question. We wonder whether the intrepid Business Week reportorial staff will be turned loose to sleuthe out a story of similar import: the debt ratings agencies’ [including McGraw-Hill Companies' Standard & Poor's unit] role in the financial crisis.
Imagine the charts porn they could do to accompany that piece!
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