When talking about the U.S. economic crisis, "slid" and "gyrated" are in. "Meltdown" and "freefall" are out -- as are "crash," "pandemonium," "panic" and "apocalypse."
For most of the country, the financial crises of the last few weeks have offered an education in economics. For journalists, they have been a lesson in semantics.
Each day presents new evidence that finance companies are uniquely vulnerable to a loss of confidence among creditors, trading partners, investors or customers. As a result, rumor, speculation and fear can cripple a bank with shocking speed. That has reporters and editors, so often accused of hyperbole and sowing alarm, parsing their words with unusual care.
So in most of the news, stocks have “slid” and markets “gyrated” but not “crashed.” Companies have “tottered” and “struggled” rather than moved toward failure and bankruptcy.
“We’re very careful not to throw words around like ‘meltdown’ and ‘free fall,’ ” said Ali Velshi, senior business correspondent at CNN. “If someone wants to say the markets are in free fall, we’ll discuss it first,” he said, and the outcome is most likely to be a change in wording.
Marcus W. Brauchli, the new executive editor of The Washington Post, said that covering Wall Street differed from any other industry. “When financial institutions are suffering a crisis in faith about themselves, journalists are inherently a little bit more prudent and cautious.”
This year, the media have been accused of contributing to the collapse of both Bear Stearns and IndyMac, a large California thrift, so journalists are more aware of the risk of stoking fear — and the risk of being blamed.
Journalists say there is a narrow gap between their duty to convey the extent of what is happening to banks and markets and causing panic. In fact, “panic” heads the list of words that major news organizations have avoided using because they are seen as potentially self-fulfilling.
“ ‘Crash,’ ‘panic,’ ‘pandemonium,’ ‘apocalypse,’ those are the words we’re staying away from,” said Robert H. Christie, a spokesman for The Wall Street Journal, now part of the News Corporation.
At the same time, no one wants to be seen as minimizing the danger. The Journal’s front page has called this the worst financial crisis since the Depression, and each day last week it carried banner headlines the entire width of the page — the first such headlines since September 2001.
If it were, say, brewers or real estate developers tumbling, the obvious next question for the media would be “Who’s next?” But journalists have been cautious about predicting the collapse of financial institutions — in fact, a number of news reports over the summer about predicted bank failures refrained from saying which were most at risk.