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Megan McArdle

Megan McArdle - Megan McArdle is a senior editor for The Atlantic who writes about business and economics. She has worked at three start-ups, a consulting firm, an investment bank, a disaster recovery firm at Ground Zero, and The Economist. She is currently on leave.
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Megan was born and raised on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, and yes, she does enjoy her lattes, as well as the occasional extra-dry skim-milk cappuccino. Her checkered work history includes three start-ups, four years as a technology project manager for a boutique consulting firm, a summer as an associate at an investment bank, and a year spent as sort of an executive copy girl for one of the disaster-recovery firms at Ground Zero � all before the age of 30.

While working at Ground Zero, Megan started Live From the WTC, a blog focused on economics, business, and cooking. She may or may not have been the first major economics blogger, depending on whether we are allowed to throw outlying variables such as Brad Delong out of the set. From there it was but a few steps down the slippery slope to freelance journalism. She has worked in various capacities for The Economist, where she wrote about economics and oversaw the founding of Free Exchange, the magazine's economics blog. She has also maintained her own blog, Asymmetrical Information, which moved to The Atlantic, along with its owner, in August 2007.

Megan holds a bachelor's degree in English literature from the University of Pennsylvania and an M.B.A. from the University of Chicago. After a lifetime as a New Yorker, she now resides in northwest Washington, D.C., where she is still trying to figure out what one does with an apartment larger than 400 square feet.

Where is the MSM Iran Coverage?

By Megan McArdle
Jun 15 2009, 9:12 AM ET Comment

One of Andrew's readers asks where the MSM is on Iran.  The New York Times and numerous internet sites have wall-to-wall coverage, including Andrew's sterling work.  Other outlets practically ignored the biggest story currently going on in the world over the weekend.

I haven't commented on it because other than the obvious--elections should result in the election of the person who got the most votes--I don't have anything to add.  I know nothing about Iran, and I don't blog much about foreign policy because I don't know much about foreign policy.

But I think Andrew's reader's question is ultimately a business story. 



Why doesn't the MSM have more coverage?  Because they don't have the manpower.  The cable networks are hamstrung by the fact that they don't have much footage of what's going on in Iran.  As I watch, they're showing a combination of shots of peaceful protests in Western countries, lying propaganda footage from Iran's state television system, and random b-roll of unidentified protests in some unidentified country that does not seem to be Iran.  This is less than must-see-TV.

The print media is hamstrung by the fact that they've slashed their foreign bureaus to the bone--and then amputated the bone.  There are too few journalists in too few places to cover a big story like this.

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