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Just as "spin" has taken over politics in America, so too has it come to define the long bull market on Wall Street. The booming trade in stocks has produced an insatiable demand for financial intelligence. On television and the Internet, commentators and analysts are not merely reporting the news, they are making news in ways that provide huge windfalls for some investors and crushing losses for others. And they often traffic in rumor, speculation, and misinformation that hit the market at warp speed.

New York Times best-selling author Howard Kurtz turns his skeptical eye on the business-media revolution that has transformed the American economy. He uncovers the backstage pressures at television shows like CNBC's Squawk Box and CNN's Moneyline and at Internet start-ups like TheStreet.com and JagNotes, real-time operations in the very arena where fortunes are made and lost with stunning swiftness.

No one has ever reported from inside the Wall Street media machine or laid bare the bitter feuds, cozy friendships, and whispered leaks that move the markets. In a time of head-spinning volatility, The Fortune Tellers is essential audio listening for all of us who gamble our savings in today's overheated stock market.

Howard Kurtz says:

My assignment for the day was to hang with a Wall Street trader who was trying to save his rear end as the market came crashing down. It was October 19, 1987, and as the New York bureau chief for The Washington Post, I was drafted on a big breaking story, despite the fact that, like most Americans, I knew little about the stock market. I wound up spending the afternoon with John Mulheren, who seemed to me icy cool as the market plunged by 22 percent and he was losing millions of dollars. (Months later, Mulheren was arrested for waving a gun and threatening to kill legendary trader Ivan Boesky, whom he believed had implicated him in an insider-trading case, but that's another story.) In those days, few ambitious reporters wanted to cover business. It seemed like a backwater, a realm of dry statistics and quarterly earnings reports. Fortune and Forbes were considered trade publications. There were a handful of business shows on the air, such as CNN's Moneyline, but otherwise television avoided the arena unless there was a market crash or some other calamity. The journalistic action was in politics, crime, sports -- anywhere but business. By the time I began work on The Fortune Tellers, the landscape had been utterly transformed. Business journalism was hot. Nearly everyone cared about Wall Street, thanks to 401-K retirement plans and online trading and a cultural revolution in which half of American families were now invested in the market. New financial magazines and Web sites were springing up, seemingly by the hour. CEOs like Jeff Bezos, Steve Case and Meg Whitman had become cult figures. Two cable networks, CNBC and CNNfn, covered the market's every burp all day long. Celebrities from William Shatner and Phil Jackson to Don Ricles and Lily Tomlin were making dot-com commercials. Even Howard Stern was talking about the market. You couldn't get on an airplane without seeing the latest Dow and Nasdaq numbers flashing on the seat in front of you. All of which raised for me some intriguing questions: Who among the steady parade of analysts, fund managers and commentators could we really trust? Was this explosion of financial advice worth a damn? And what role did journalism play in a world where every hiccup could send a stock hurtling toward the sky --or into the toilet? The results aren't pretty. The advice served up by many of these fortune tellers is not only contradictory, it's often wrong -- but almost no one in the media holds these folks accountable. The press often fails to blow the whistle on blatant conflicts of interest, as Wall Street analysts tout the stocks of companies that their own firms are either doing business with or hoping to snag as clients.

The talking heads themselves are often influenced by cozy relationships with their sources. That's true in other fields as well, but financial journalists are not just observers but players -- their scoops and stories can slice billions of dollars off a company's net worth in a matter of minutes. Wall Street, I learned, is like a snooty high school where half the people hate the other half -- and that sometimes has an impact on the coverage. Even worse, this is the only part of journalism where it's considered okay to report rumors, even bogus ones, on the theory that rumors move the market. But the media now serve as a giant echo chamber for this gossip, giving it legitimacy for millions who otherwise would never hear the Street chatter. Fortunately for me, the financial media machine is filled with all kinds of colorful personalities who do their thing under fierce pressures, making them compelling subjects for a behind-the-scenes narrative. Best of all, I got to hang with CNBC's Money Honey, Maria Bartiromo, who, I can report, is a lot better looking than John Mulheren."

Written & audio book narrated by Howard Kurtz - Abridged Nonfiction - 3 CASSETTES

Publisher, Simon & Schuster Audioworks (October 2000)