Research Paper thoughts and concerns...

Topic:
Financial scandals; reporting of financial scandals, regulations, Bernie Madoff, AIG

Thesis:
Difference between the reporting on current financial scandals, specially the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme and the AIG situation; how newspapers are reporting these two events and if they’re noting the difference between legal banking risk (AIG) and illegal banking schemes (Madoff).
Questions address in paper – Is it important to recognize and report the difference between the two scandals? How are both events being reported? What role does deregulation play in the situation and reporting?

Notes:
I will be using the Wall Street Journal as the source of reporting of these two stories (I will look at a week of reporting about the Madoff story and a week of reporting on the AIG story).
Should I use other reporting regarding these stories? Maybe additional reporting from media outlets such as CNN or Fox News or even bloggers? Or should I strictly focus paper/research on reporting by the Wall Street Journal?
Should I include editorial/opinion pieces from the paper, or stick with the actually news stories from the newspaper?

Research:
One week of reporting by the Wall Street Journal regarding Bernie Madoff’s Ponzi scheme:
- The week was between December 12, 2008 to December 19th, 2008.
- From the four articles that I read from that week I found a running theme in the pieces about the role of the Securities Exchange Commission (SEC) in the story. At first, when reporting the story, the news reporters mentioned how Madoff swindled thousands of people over the years and in the end, loss about $50billion in his investors’ money. The interesting thing about the news stories is that quickly the reporters turned the spotlight and even blame away from Madoff and rather shined the light onto the SEC and even the people that believed in Madoff and were fooled by his scheme. The articles bring up a shocking finding that the SEC was made aware of possible illegal actions by Madoff nearly 16 years ago. Each article continued to discuss all the times when other people mentioned that something must be going-on at Madoff’s investment firm and yet each time the SEC did nothing to investigate the suspicions.
- After reading these articles, I wondered how the SEC could have not seen this coming years ago and why they did nothing to stop this man. I also was amazed at the fact that the scheme wasn’t discovered until Madoff himself confessed his crimes to his two sons.
- This made me thing of the role of media, specifically the media’s job as a watchdog. I’m surprised that this story didn’t get news coverage years ago and that the media didn’t discover the scheme before it was confessed.
- The story also brings to light the role of regulations, not in the media but in the banking world. America is the country that is it because people are allowed to be creative and free to be innovated- I believe that regulations definitely hinders people’s ability to be creative; however, what this story proves is that regulations are need more than even today. But, I’m not sure if this is important to my paper; I think that I should be looking at the regulations and deregulations of reporting in the media, rather than in the financial world.
- My biggest problem right now is defining my main point, I’m not sure if I truly understand where I’m going with my thesis and what my argument is.

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