Danny Schechter, author of the Cosimo book Plunder: Investigating Our Economic Calamity and the Subprime Scandal, has garnered yet more praise for his prescient and hard-hitting attention to the global financial crisis in the years before it came to a head.

Veteran media critic and Emmy winner Rory O’Connor, in his latest column for mediachannel.org, “Embedded Business Press Misses Story of the Century,” rips apart the “complaisant business press” that “missed the story of the disaster now threatening the very pillars of the global capitalist system itself”:

Complicity, careerism, access, ratings, deregulation, glory, money, corporate and conglomerate media… the reasons behind our pusillanimous press coverage of the run up to the financial meltdown are much the same as those underlying the run up to war – and so are the results. Business reporters ‘embedded’ on Wall Street — as enamored of titans of commerce as their Pentagon press peers were with Donald Rumsfeld and Colin Powell – are now piling bad information on top of no information. Once again, we-the-people are paying the price in treasure and sadly, in some cases, blood.

Of course, I’m not alone in pointing fingers. As the AP’s David Bauder recently reported, “some of the nation’s top financial journalists believe reporters dropped the ball as the nation’s economy tumbled toward crisis mode.”

But O’Connor singles out some journalists who were doing their jobs during those crucial years, including Schechter:

There were also, however, many shining examples of journalists doing their jobs well, asking tough questions, getting surprising answers, and presenting them to a world still stuck inside a frothy financial bubble about to burst. In some cases they toiled at major outlets such as the New York Times and the Financial Times, where columnists including Paul Krugman, Joe Nocera, the estimable Martin Wolf and others all did their best to call attention to the gathering storm. But in most instances they were outliers – bloggers, researchers, and even filmmakers — people who didn’t usually specialize in business reporting or even analysis. Veteran gadfly and self-styled News Dissector Danny Schechter was first, and is still foremost, among them.

Schechter (DISCLOSURE: my colleague and business partner at the Globalvision) was so far ahead of the curve that he managed to research, shoot and edit an entire documentary predicting the coming collapse (In Debt We Trust: America Before the Bubble Bursts) literally years before it unfolded. Schechter, who blogs at MediaChannel’s News Dissector site, also began writing about the coming crisis daily (some said obsessively,) while simultaneously aggregating information from a wide range of other sources, including many specialized economics blogs. When he began, many within progressive media circles were puzzled at Schechter’s newfound focus and wondered why he had departed from his earlier emphasis on “politics” – as if the economic shenanigans and subprime crimes he was detailing had no political dimensions!

Read the introduction to Plunder here. (Alert: PDF.)

Plunder is available at Amazon.com and from other online booksellers.