(h/t: Jake and UtterlyBoring.com)

Excuse me?

First, and probably most importantly, the story the documentary is trying to tell is the blow-by-blow of what happened last year. How we got from a place where most people thought was good, or at least not FAIL, to where we are now.

But secondly, and the part that I find most audacious from Chicken Little johnny-come-latelies, is where were you 5 years ago. Oh, that’s right, at anti-Iraq war rallies. If the regulatory system was really a problem why didn’t we hear anything from you then?

Maybe you’ll stop reading, because these are from the so-called MSM (also known as THE ONLY PEOPLE ACTUALLY CALLING AND INTERVIEWING PEOPLE, SO MAYBE THEY AREN’T THE DEVIL)…but I highly recommend the following:

Vanity Fair on Bear Stearns failure.

Washington Post on what led to the housing collapse.

New Yorker on Ben Bernanke and the crisis. (most important reading of the past 2 years.)

New York Times on the role of regulatory agencies and quasi-governmental companies.

New York Times on Paulson’s transformation.

New York Times on the day the government started to privatize the banks.

Per the New York Times:

Among other facts, the Statistical Abstract reveals that West Virginia is the only state in which more people have died since 2000 than have been born; more Burmese were granted asylum than people from any other country; more people speak Italian at home than Arabic; beds injure more people than bicycles; per capita consumption of tea has surpassed that of fruit juice; enrollment of college students from Saudi Arabia and Iran has returned to the levels before the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Also, women make up a majority of pharmacists, bartenders and bus drivers and nearly half the medical students granted degrees; bottled water consumption is up at the same time that per capita water use nationally is down; 91 percent of the nearly 12 million surgical and other cosmetic procedures performed in 2007 involved women; consumer complaints against airlines soared to 10,960 last year from 6,452 the year before. Among adults, Jews no longer outnumber Mormons; 57 percent of teenage girls reported having sexual contact in the previous 12 months.

Americans are spending more on prescription drugs ($259 billion in 2007, compared with $72 billion in 1995); the number of people living on the Atlantic Coast of Florida has risen 13 percent since 2000; gambling revenue at American Indian sites nearly doubled to $26 billion since 2002; nearly half of Americans under age 5 are Hispanic or nonwhite; the number of people 75 and over has doubled since 1980 to 18 million; only 5.5 percent of workers age 16 to 24 are represented by unions.

My favorite piece of this story comes one week later, when NPR’s Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me quiz show addressed the issue of sagging pants, and the audience and panel reacted, almost in total unison, in agreement with President-elect Obama.

Imagine this now: Barack Obama gets out at a rest stop, and is mobbed.

This time in an article about Oregon’s health care lottery.

On a day that the New York Times’ front-paged Jamie Lynn Spears, NPR’s Bryant Park Project (the new test morning show — call it NPR, NOW FOR FOR KIDS!) interviewed Chicago Tribune Africa correspondent Paul Salopek.

Read it, listen to it. He really does a good job of exposing why we ignore heartbreaking, world-affecting stories like the tragedy in Congo. And why we choose to care about some conflicts, instead of others.

Oregon Considered, the local news show for which I’ve been filing most of my OPB feature stories since July, will be canceled at the end of the month.

As a reporter who wants to get on air, you’d think I’d dislike the decision. But, as a reporter, I also like it when people hear my stuff. And not enough people listen to local-only news anymore. They will listen to local+national, and thats the model we’re going for now.

WNYC, New York’s NPR station, and KPCC, LA’s big NPR news station, went to this model a few years ago, and it has been both successful and well-liked. So I think we’ll see how people really feel about the switch in a couple months.