MEDIA MANEUVERS: Vanity Fair Joins in on Bashing of Already Nicely Pummeled Web Analyst Meeker
Yvette Kantrow
7/6/2001 11:11
Just when we thought we couldn't read another word about analysts and the bubble, Vanity Fair weighs in with its own high-gloss take on the topic. In its August issue, the very glossy monthly rehashes what seemingly everyone already knows -- that high-profile analysts who boosted Internet stocks were not only wrong but were often serving interests different from those of investors -- but tells the story from its own top-of-the-glitterati-heap, media-centric point of view.
Written by Nina Munk, the thirtysomething daughter of Canadian magnate Peter Munk once celebrated for bringing ''brat attitude'' to Fortune magazine, the piece asserts that we all should have known analysts had become too ''inflated'' in April 1999 when The New Yorker -- Vanity Fair's slightly higher-browed Conde Nast sibling -- profiled Morgan Stanley's Mary Meeker. Sure, Meeker had already made it to the cover of Barron's, Munk tells us, but ''being in The New Yorker was different though; it established that research analysts had become celebrities of a sort known not only on Wall Street but also among people interested in John Updike's musings on pennies and nickels.'' In other words, Meeker's fame had reached the cultural elite -- a tipoff that it was about to end.
Indeed, two years after the New Yorker piece, Meeker was over -- a fact Munk says was evidenced by a May cover story in Fortune that named the analyst ''the single most powerful symbol of how Wall Street can lead investors astray.'' About the same time, she points out, New York magazine media critic Michael Wolff observed that ''Meeker seems almost demented.''
Reading her Vanity Fair piece, you get the feeling that Munk agrees.
The author tells us that ''despite the hopes expressed in her New Yorker profile, Meeker is not yet married with children. But in contrast to her colleagues, she's still bullish about Internet stocks.'' By stringing those sentences together, Munk seems to suggest that Meeker's Web optimism is so insane, it's scaring away her suitors. Now that's an interesting topic for Conde Nast's Glamour magazine to explore.
Munk writes that she tried to talk to Meeker but her interview request was denied. Merrill Lynch & Co. media analyst Jessica Reif Cohen wasn't so lucky. Though Munk concedes that Reif Cohen ''hasn't been called out on any obvious conflicts of interest'' she takes a shot at her anyway, commenting on, of all things, her clothes. Reif Cohen shows up dressed ''as if it were still the 80s,'' Munk sniffs, donning an expensive suit and dripping with Cartier gold and jewels. But Munk should consider that it could have been worse -- she could have been sporting khakis and a polo as if it were still the late '90s.
Fortune also kept the analyst story going this week, examining it from the Washington point of view, and patting itself on the back in the process. It asserts that its May story on Meeker spurred Rep. Richard Baker from Louisiana to call for congressional hearings on the role of analyst conflicts and the bubble. ''I found it highly disturbing that a top analyst showed no sense of responsibility to the individual investor,'' Fortune quotes Baker as saying. ''That story motivated me to pull the trigger.''
That may be so. But Baker's statement makes you wonder where he was last fall, when The New York Times' Gretchen Morgenson first started harping on analysts as if they were devils incarnate, or in December, when ABC News' John Stossel blasted Goldman, Sachs & Co.'s Anthony Noto for recommending Priceline and eBay on CNBC without revealing that his firm had underwritten the stocks.
Still, Fortune uses his quote high in its piece, becoming the latest pub to spin the analyst-conflict story as if it were its own.
What's interesting about all this for close readers is the fact driving most of these stories -- that analysts largley function as investment bankers who often push stocks their firms are underwriting -- has been an open secret on Wall Street for years. Breaking that story is akin to shouting the emperor has no clothes, which a handful of journalists have been doing for years. But until very recently, their shouts were either drowned out by more bullish colleagues or met with an editor's yawn.
Now, however, people are losing money. And the media wants some credit for saving the day. Given that analyst conflicts were so widely known, no one -- not Morgenson or Stossel and certainly not Fortune or Vanity Fair -- can say they first revealed the sordid truth. What they can boast about is their clout -- Richard Baker reads Fortune! -- and their timing. |
