The linked article misses the fundamental point. It's not a question of whether or not financial journalists should have predict the current collapse, but whether or not they should have acted as more than just cheerleaders.

A journalist's function is to collect a large volume of complex raw data and distill it into an important and understandable explanation of what's going on in the world. The ways that the financial journalists failed us are in:

a) ignoring the systemic problems (both governmental and institutional)
b) failing to fully understand the issues that they are reporting on
c) passing along managerial cheerleading as news and facts
d) not distinguishing between well informed opinions and off the cuff remarks.

Incidentally, these are the same issues which cause other branches of the media to under server and mislead their customers.

With financial reporting, perhaps the biggest disservice is the first. Without even reporting on the systemic problems, even if to dismiss the seriousness of them, individuals lack the information required to form intelligent decisions. Whether or not financial journalists are responsible for predicting the future, Warren Buffet is and he flubbed this one - how are less skilled and informed investors supposed to do better?

The article accuses Jon Stewart of being overly hard on CNBC, but the real damage to that network comes from the clips the Stewart played. Over and over CNBC was encouraging people to buy stocks as the market spiraled downward, over and over they said financial institutions were sound shortly before they went belly up.

The problem isn't that the people at CNBC didn't predict the future, it's that their predictions were so wrong and delivered with such conviction. Shouldn't they have encouraged some level of caution?

It would be reaching to state that CNBC's motives were merely to hold up stock prices so that institutional investors could dump them. However ignoring that possibility, they still lack any credibility and the question remains - what was their motive? Are they really just that clueless?

CNBC has spent years presenting itself as being able to predict the future. As providing the relevant news for investors to stay informed. Now that they have spent 18 months giving the worst possible advice, they are claiming that nobody can predict these things? Either they were misrepresenting things then or now (or both). Their investment advice seems to be simply "If the market is going up, buy. If the market is going down then everything is a bargain so buy fast."

Finally, the article's discussion of investigative journalism is a distraction. The failure of financial journalists wasn't that none of them were meeting informants in parking garages late at night. The failure was that they weren't analyzing the financial sectors exposure to risk, identifying companies not performing sufficient contingency planning or talking about gaps in regulation posing a severe hazard to investors. Or in other words, they weren't doing their jobs.

No, they didn't need to predict the crash. But all they did was sell the boom.