Dr. Julien Mercille:

I mentioned it. The claim is the journalists were not well qualified to cover financial or economic issues. If they were better trained or went back to school they would have been better. I would downplay it as an explanation. Of course the more knowledge one has about economics the better one is at understanding issues and that is fine, but journalists are generalists and cannot be expected to be experts on every topic they cover. They know enough to study and have a good grasp of some issues and maybe get the right expert to explain to them what is going on if they do not understand. If all Irish journalists were retrained and made do a PhD in economics in a university anywhere it would not have helped that much because much of the economics profession was not active in warning about the bubble.