Dr. Julien Mercille:

I looked much less at television because it is much harder to get an archive for that. Thankfully, "Prime Time" had all of its programmes online. It removed them after I carried out the study but I do not know if there is a link. At that time it had them so I looked at that in more detail. There were over 700 programmes but I did not watch them all. Thank God, at the beginning of every programme, they say, "We are going to talk about 1, 2 and 3" which meant one just had to watch the first bit. I saved time like that. There was very little coverage of the topic.

I wish to make an important point about the media. When one says that the media sustained the housing bubble, it does not mean that the media every day was saying "There is no housing bubble". A lot of it is just not talking about it, closing one's eyes and saying "Yes whatever. There is something going on." "Prime Time" is a good example because it did not talk about the bubble too much. One had stories about health care, tragedies, political elections or whatever, but few news items on the bubble. When the bubble was covered, like I said, it was mostly by relying on experts from the financial sector, for example.