In today’s hypercompetitive, 24-hour news cycle, the media’s primary job is too often to find a villain rather than doing analysis and finding an explanation. This exacerbates the lack of public trust in financial institutions. It does nothing to help transparency, and in fact may make things worse by urging companies to become more opaque to avoid media scrutiny. It also fuels bad regulation; they act as information intermediaries between regulators and the public they serve.
… A lack of transparency heightens media concerns, encouraging them to find scapegoats for financial crises rather than search for structural explanations to the problems we face as a society. And, not surprisingly, the heightened sensationalism created by the media in turn fuels continued mistrust.