How did reporters miss the biggest story?

Dean Starkman, a former reporter for The Wall Street Journal, wrote a piece for this month's Mother Jones analyzing why reporters - about 9,000 print reporters alone - could have missed the biggest economic story on their beat.
From the story:

"There was a handful of heroes at the major publications who tried to get the word out. But the good, hard-hitting, arm's-length stories will have to be compared to what else was gushing out of the 30-inch business-news drainpipe—those Citigroup earnings stories, those edgy-yet-flattering profiles of Merrill Lynch's Stan O'Neal, Lehman Brothers' Dick Fuld, et al., the pieces noting how Countrywide Financial's Angelo Mozilo liked to dress well, etc., not to mention the Home Depot marketing stories, the personal finance columns, and all the cheerleading and Flip That House fluff that diverted resources from the real task at hand. What was really the business-press message? It was certainly not that mortgage lenders and Wall Street had linked up to flood the market with defective products."