“John Meriwether.. is in the process of setting up a new hedge fund – his third.”

-       The Financial Times.

“Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.”

-       Popular saying, though probably not in Greenwich, Connecticut.

A recent posting on the consistently excellent Naked Capitalism weblog (“Mainstream Media Reporting as Propaganda”) touches on one of the more frustrating aspects of the financial crisis – why have the media been so supine in the face of wholesale abuse of the public purse, and why have the bailouts not triggered broader social disquiet ? In both the US and the UK, money is being distributed to banks from taxpayers – involuntarily – then passing straight through those organisations and speedily excreted out the other side in the form of bonuses. On the former topic, journalist Matt Taibbi (of “vampire squid” fame) commented that

“It’s literally amazing to me that our press corps hasn’t yet managed to draw a distinction between good news on Wall Street for companies like Goldman, and good news in reality.

“I watched carefully the reporting of the Dow breaking 10,000.. and not anywhere did I see a major news organization include a paragraph of the “On the other hand, so.. what?” sort, one that might point out that unemployment is still at a staggering high, foreclosures are racing along at a terrifying clip, and real people are struggling more than ever. In fact the dichotomy between the economic health of ordinary people and the traditional “market indicators” is not merely a non-story, it is a sort of taboo — unmentionable in major news coverage.”

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