Dr. Julien Mercille:

Yes, it did. As I said, Deputy Shane Ross said there were explicit threats that advertising would move elsewhere if coverage was negative. Shane Ross is not like a minor journalist. He knows what is going on. We had journalists, and there is a study that I cited, that said explicitly "Yeah, we had pressures from our bosses to give good coverage." The thing is one does not have to find something explicit saying, "The boss made the phonecall to a journalist to tell him to do this and that." It does not work like that. Journalists know very well. In any institution one has rules to play by. One does not need to be told every day by one's boss that one needs to dress like this or that and not to do this and that. If one is in an institution for many years one understands perfectly well. One might not be aware of it but one certainly behaves in that way. If journalists, during the housing bubble, had consistently produced stories saying the bubble will crash and that it is a bubble and all of that, then they would have had a lot of opposition from the media, as we saw with Morgan Kelly. In terms of a lot of those dynamics, it is not about finding a hidden e-mail or something that will say explicitly one needs to behave a certain way. It is just understood within the institution.