Note to media: Please stop referring to Eliot Spitzer as the Sheriff of Wall Street. The title certainly doesn't fit now, and arguably didn't fit a decade ago when he took Wall Street to task for putting out conflicted research on stocks. Lest we forget, Spitzer never prosecuted -- let...

There's a dog on the cover of Money magazine. A market-tested dog. He's cute -- he is, after all, a dog -- but he's also rather plain and generic, neither too foofy nor too tough, too mutt-like nor too well-bred, wholly unlikely to offend.

His owners are similarly nondescript,...

It was bound to happen. With Goldman, Sachs and Co. suffering a barrage of bad publicity and bumbling its public image for two years running, the media would eventually find and expose the executive responsible for managing the firm's relationship with the press and the world. It was all well...

So what's the difference between an analyst and a journalist, anyway? Media maneuvers was initially vexed by this question a long decade or so ago, when Eliot Spitzer rode into town and exposed just how conflicted Wall Street research was. It turned out that many analysts didn't really believe all...

For a media that was sent to the woodshed for helping to inflate and failing to predict two disastrous bubbles in a single decade -- dot-coms and housing -- perhaps it stands to reason that its motto these days seems to be "we won't get fooled again."

How else to...

Who is your financial role model: Elmo or Cookie Monster?

That was the headline I was greeted with when I logged on to Moneyland, Time Inc.'s new personal-finance website. The right answer is, of course, Elmo, who assiduously avoids "impulse buys" and saves for the future, unlike Cookie...

It seems as if every magazine on the face of the planet is seeking to redesign itself for a digital world, which mostly means littering their pages with arrows, bullet points, swooshes and other assorted doodads, all in an attempt to appeal to readers who consume much of their media...

Nearly three years after the financial world imploded, the business media is still operating under a cloud of shame for failing to sound the alarm that the end was near. The press, the story goes, should have warned us sooner that real estate was a bubble, subprime mortgages a crock,...

New rule: When the media reports on a screwup at Berkshire Hathaway, it can no longer call it a "rare mark" on Warren Buffett's sterling reputation. After all, the word "rare" should be used only to describe events that occur at fairly lengthy intervals, like solar eclipses. But Buffett has...

The media has long taken it on faith that private equity is an evil, possibly criminal, enterprise, run by money-hungry fraudsters who bury their companies in debt, rape them for fat dividends and charge onerous fees to their investors. (Who can forget the old Businessweek's infamous "Gluttons at the Gate"...

So here's what passes for a big M&A; scoop these days: a Wall Street Journal story, on the front page no less, reporting that executives at Facebook Inc. and Google Inc. have held "low-level talks" with their counterparts at Twitter Inc. to "explore the prospect of an acquisition."...

Filled with self-styled straight shooters who claim to be beholden to no one, the blogosphere has long positioned itself as an antidote to the so-called access journalism racking the mainstream media, most infamously during the run-up to the Iraq War and, more recently, in the run-up to the financial crisis....

A few weeks ago, in the midst of the pre-Christmas doldrums, The New York Observer ran a short item proclaiming the Wall Street Journal the dominant outlet for M&A; reporting. One week earlier, the Observer had produced a gushing ode to The New York Times' ever-expanding DealBook, complete with details...

The media has always loved Jamie Dimon. After all, he turned around Bank One Corp., kept J.P. Morgan Chase & Co. profitable through one of the worst financial crises in history and helped the government save Bear Stearns Cos. and Washington Mutual from oblivion. And he did it all after...

More than two years have passed since the financial system almost went up in flames, but a big question remains: What should we do about the banks? Nationalize them? Break 'em up? Turn them into utilities? Bring back Glass-Steagall? These are tough issues, filled with endless complexities. But for a...

A commentator looking to take down a Wall Street macher could do worse than setting his sights on Steven Rattner. The former New York Times reporter, investment banker, private equity investor, Obama car czar and general big-man-around-town has reportedly been in settlement talks with the Securities and Exchange Commission over...

What is it about the 1980s that makes the decade so irresistible to journalists covering Wall Street? Despite everything that the financial world has been through these past decades -- the rise and fall of leveraged buyouts, the tech boom and bust, the spectacular bursting of the housing bubble followed...

James Surowiecki's column in The New Yorker last week focused on a simple yet rarely discussed fact: When it comes to finance, many Americans are basically clueless. They don't know the difference between fixed-rate and adjustable-rate mortgages; they don't understand inflation; they can't explain what compound interest is....

Reporting on rumors has always been part of the deal with the journalism racket. Speculative stories about company X looking to buy company Y, or company Z hiring Poopsnoop, Flackerie & Grinde, LLP to find itself a buyer, are the thinly sourced stuff that eventual scoops are made of, even...

Bloomberg Businessweek owes Lloyd Blankfein a very big, wet kiss.

When the first issue of the redesigned magazine hit newsstands a few weeks back, Goldman, Sachs & Co. was the biggest story around -- and not just among the business crowd. By putting a black-and-white photo of a...