DialogueMagazine

completely modified requirements of today’s communication and media in the broader sense. “We Can’t Read the Cristal Ball” The discussion was kicked of by the question whether journalists failed to anticipate the crisis and what the reasons for this might have been. Andy Reinhardt, representing business journalism responded with a clear “yes” to this question. Qualifying his response he explained that even thoughmanybusinessjournalistssawthedifferent developments leading up to the crisis, they still failed to put the pieces together in order to grasp the dimension of the financial and later on global economical downturn. However he suggested that if rating agencies regulators and central bankers failed to anticipate the crisis, it might have been inevitable for journalists to fail as well. “We can’t read the crystal ball and are not responsible for predicting the future” Andy Reinhardt concluded his thoughts. Hans Obermeier supported this opinion by emphasizing the aspect that almost everyone working in the financial sector dealing with financial instruments that essentially caused the crisis did not understand the implications of what they were doing and what was happening. If these people who have a much more profound knowledge about their actions within the market and furthermore access to inside information failed to anticipate what was going to happen, how can we make journalists responsible for failing to predict the crisis. The panellists consensus about discharging journalism and conventional media from the responsibility for failing to anticipate the financial crisis was to some extent surprising, as leading journalists accepted this responsibility and admitted shortcomings within their news coverage in the time preceding the crisis at the journalism conference “Covering the crisis” that took place in the Fall of 2009. Oliver Rosenthal commented that in the course of the digitalization of media and especially social media it has become increasingly difficult to filter relevant and authentic news from the overwhelming abundance of information. Andreas Knaut remarked that exactly this problem makes conventional business journalism even more important in the future, as consumers will find themselvesincapabletosortoutimportant,relevant and especially true information thus relying on trustworthy and high quality news coverage. Panels_Power of Information Photo: Bryan S. Kissinger