PBS Screws Up Report on Financial Crisis

And on the bailout, there was no examination of why no conditions were placed on capital injections into banks, no hearings allowed, not even full disclosure. Frontline skittered over the surface of these stories but did not advance them. Its big "gotcha" seemed to be the irony of Paulson, pictured only as a free-marketer (when he was also an environmental liberal) forced to become an interventionist. If he was so against government, why did he become Treasury secretary? Duh?

Even the Times, which concluded its review with the familiar, "We are all guilty, everybody did it" mantra, noted the thinness of the reporting: "Mr. (Chris) Dodd and Representative Barney Frank, Democrat of Massachusetts, are the only members of Congress interviewed in the piece, which is a weakness. Many voters hold Republicans and Democrats equally responsible for oversight failures. Frontline holds these politicians up as reliable, unbiased witnesses, but some viewers may feel they don’t deserve that trust."