An unpopular truth about the news you read

[unixronin]

Orson Scott Card on lies, damned lies, and election campaign reporting

OK, so you think Card is a religious fundamentalist.  In many ways, you may be right.

You may consider Card a homophobe.  I doubt he sees it that way, but you're within your rights to say that too.  If you're gay, I doubt the practical distinction matters to you.

Neither of those change the fact that what he has to say on this particular issue — honesty and objectivity in journalism — is perfectly true.  Judge the message, not the messenger.

Comments

[ilcylic.livejournal.com]

Judge the message, not the messenger.

Good luck with that.

[fruitylips.livejournal.com]

*shrug* He's right...

The best part about this entire election was having about half the Democrats (that'd be HRC supports) find out good and hard that the Republicans haven't just been whining about the media all these years.

[ilcylic.livejournal.com]

You racist.

[ithildae.livejournal.com]

But the new that is reported is reported without bias! See, journalists are honest.

I have a friend that works as a journalist. She claims that there is no real pressure brought on from newspaper owners about what to report on. It is strictly the news department that determines what is reported. That decision is based on what people want to read. (Remember, newspapers make their money from advertisers, not readers.) The reporters are in the business of selling newspapers. They are not in the business of reporting what the public should know, or needs to know. News is a business. It exists to make money. The facts don't really matter.

Card has always been a bit on the weird side. My mother has a friend that went to high school with him. I have met him several times. His views are a bit shrill for my taste and comfort. He is an interesting character.

[luke-jaywalker.livejournal.com]

I'd add another line of reasoning to that "news is a business" thing. I'm a former journalist, and I have a number of friends who are. This is a typical resume, belonging to one friend:

- English degree at small college in upstate NY near his hometown.
- 2 years of interning, his junior and senior college years, at a chain of local papers in upstate NY near the college.
- After graduation, worked for 1.5 years as a junior reporter for the same chain he'd interned for.
- Went to Boston University School of Journalism, a top-5 school in that field, for his masters' degree. Graduated.
- While doing his masters', freelanced a bit.
- Hired as an editorial assistant at the Boston Herald. Starting salary (1.5 years plus freelance experience, 2 years interning, masters degree from top-5 school): about $23k.

He's thirty-one, now. A few months ago, more than five years after graduating from BU with that masters, he exuberantly let me know that his salary had finally hit $30k. Oh, and we're talking Boston cost-of-living here.

You don't do journalism for the money. The same skillset is applicable in areas like corporate PR and communications, which pay *far* more - twice as much or more. My friend is an idealist, and it doesn't hurt that his wife, as soon as she graduates with her Ph.D, will be making six figures. He's fine because of *that* income.

But if you don't do journalism for the money, why do you do it? It's fun, but that's not always enough. The people who *do* value money tend not to last long as reporters: they get offered a PR job for twice as much money and take it. The ones who last long enough to become desk editors or managing editors, the ones who make editorial decisions... why do they stay?

a) It's fun hanging around high-level people. It's also fun and very possible, although absolutely immoral, to fancy yourself a player. I know a couple of journalists who figure that it's their *right* to play power games with facts because, after all, they get so little monetary compensation. b) People who are driven primarily by stuff other than money - who don't mind, in their thirties, not being able to afford a car or a place of their own. These people tend to be leftists.

It's a screwed-up culture and a 100-150% pay raise would fix it, eventually (in that right-leaning people and moderates wouldn't have the incentive not to be reporters, would give fair and even coverage and eventually become editors), but where's that money going to come from? Especially right now, due to all this downsizing and cost-cutting, journalism salaries are lower than they've ever been.

[ithildae.livejournal.com]

Yeah. Thanks for the perspective.

[cymrullewes.livejournal.com]

Your stuff is stowed in the crawlspace. You owe me $1 per month and I'll keep it and use it to send your stuff to you when you're ready.

[smandal.livejournal.com]

Yes, but would it surprise anyone that the Democrats came up with a huge program with massive gov't liabilities to help low-income people do something? It's not a story.

Similarly, it's not a story when neocons practice crony capitalism to help out their country-club buddies.

What sells is drama, not penetrating analysis. The US population is not worthy of its democracy. I'll repeat my pet theory: since around 1980, when it became clear we would win the Cold War, the US zeitgesit has not been based in reality.

[jmkelly.livejournal.com]

OSC complains about bias, but somehow gets through the entire piece without mentioning Phil Gramm's contribution to the mess. Bad mortgages were only part of the problem. The other part is deregulation: the bad mortgages were not confined to the banks that wrote them but were bundled by the thousands into mortgage-backed securities which were then traded as investments in themselves. It was impossible to know the risk/profitability of these securities or the even more sophisticated variations on them that followed, but they looked good on paper, so no investment officer who valued his job could pass them up. Similarly, a lot of mortgage brokers were making money as fast as they could -- because they knew it wouldn't last forever -- writing mortgage applications that were out-and-out frauds. "This American Life" ran the story of a borrower who was amazed to learn that the broker had set down his income as about $15,000 a month; the guy had rarely made that much in a year. The broker could do that because he'd sell that mortgage as soon as it was signed. He HAD to do it to stay in business, because everyone else was doing it.

p.s.

[jmkelly.livejournal.com]

Before someone beats me to it, I'll mention that Bill Clinton and his appointees were equally deeply involved in deregulation of the finance industry.

Re: p.s.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I think that was half Card's point. The press is managing to almost completely avoid covering that part of the problem, just like they're managing to almost completely avoid covering any campaign gaffes from Obama and Biden, like Joe Biden not actually knowing what the duties and responsibilities of the Vice-President are, or Obama's missteps when he's not working from a prepared speech. (But they're going all out to crucify "Joe the Plumber" for daring to publicly question their idol's Plan For America.)

Re: p.s.

[jilara.livejournal.com]

No, they're crucifying "Joe the Plumber" because dirt is news. Or should I say, dirt sells papers.

I'm in an extremely cynical mood right now. I've just watched "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" again, and it doesn't present a flattering image of the press, even when they're the "good guys."

[skellington.livejournal.com]

I won't disagree that the media is biased, and perhaps Obama has received a relatively free ride (although Fox and company would have been pushing anything that is really more serious than the fact he served on a charitable board with Ayers.)

And I won't disagree that there are problems with corruption in Washington and that Fannie & Freddie were weird bastard hybrids of public and private companies that paid an awful lot to lobby various people.

But Freddie and Fannie, and the various home-ownership initiatives, are only peripherally related to the crash. And those initiatives were supported by Bush and the republicans. (One of Bush's agencies blocked Georgia from implementing a law in 2006 cracking down on sub-prime mortgages, for example.)

First, the problem is international. Britain, Spain, and Ireland (among others) had a similar housing bubble. So our policies aren't the driving factor of the housing bubble.

Second, the problem is not just housing. A combination of credit derivitives and fancy financial instruments (CDS's, CDO's, etc.) and "low risk premiums" (i.e. investing money or making loans at stupid low rates for really risky things) were present in all areas of finance. Look up "Covenant Lite" (Cov-Lite) loans for commercial investment. Look up leverage buyouts in the stock market in the last 5 years. Look at the impending crash of commercial real estate as well. Heck, look at Iceland's mess.

Third, Freddie and Fannie committed some serious accounting fraud and were slapped down by the federal regulators in 2002 or so. So during the peak of the bubble years weren't doing nearly as much business as the private companies packaging mortgages. They went from about 50% of the sub-prime business to about 25% of the sub-prime business when the problems really started happening. Blaming Freddie and Fannie when they weren't doing the business is absurd.

Forth, Card mixes up "minority and low income" and "sub-prime". Lots of minorities and low income people are candidates for prime loans. They're not LARGE prime loans, but they're perfectly good credit risks if buying a moderate home. And even the sub-prime loans are perfectly profitable if they are appropriately priced. (i.e. affordable to the home owner, don't have adjustable rates, pre-payment penalties, and a suitably high interest rate to compensate for the extra risk.) (And as you're well aware, you can end up with a crummy credit rating, but then get a good job and have a great income.)

Many (in terms of total loan amounts) of the sub-prime loans issued in California and Florida and other boom states were NOT to low income people. The problem was that moderate and higher income people, including speculators, couldn't afford the houses with "prime" underwriting, so were forced to go to the sub-prime market.

And then non-traditional lenders (i.e. mortgage brokers who are now out of business) pushed loans, with money from private investment banks (Bear Sterns, etc.) and skipped the traditional underwriting (i.e. investigation) guidelines, and, surprise surprise, lots of them defaulted.

(continued)

[skellington.livejournal.com]

If you want to point fingers somewhere, I'd look at some combination of (A) lots of cash from China and the third world pushing down interest rates, (B) the fed lowering interest rates to 1%, so short-term borrowing was really cheap, and (C) various governments letting banks and hedge funds dramatically increase their leverage creating money to chase risky investments. (The SEC allowed the investment banks to go from 12:1 leverage to 30:1 leverage in 2004, right when the boom really took off.)

I'd throw in some blame for the rating agencies, which called these securities "AAA", when they were crap. And some blame for the folks who created opaque complex financial derivities.

You can also blame the government for not listening when the appraisers said fraud was happening, inflating home prices. Or for not putting some restrictions on the "No Documentation" or "Low Documentation" loans (which were absurd and much of the cause of the problem.)

And since the Freddie&Fannie thing is major reason for criticizing the journalists, I'd say that the article is pretty weak. (Some of the other claims, such as that Freddie Raines ever provided advice for Obama's campaign, are also apparently false.)

For more details on Fannie and Freddie and low-income loans, take a look at:

http://www.econbrowser.com/archives/2008/10/cra_fannie_and.html and follow a bunch of their links.

[koyote.livejournal.com]

hahahahaha! Sorry, but is to laugh.

1: the housing bubble and potential crisis have been reported for years. In the past week I've been looking at archived articles since 2002. The ADMINISTRATION spokespeople and "employees" denied the bubble existing even in potential for years.

2: Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac haven't just been giving money to someone's pet "evildoers" in the Democratic Party. They're pretty equal opportunity.

3: I've seen the so called liberal media go along with some pretty asinine republican led witch hunts. The media isn't secretly controlled by communazidemocratdevils. From misreporting the 2000 election to clinton's sex life to ignoring Bush's military service record in favor or trying to armchair judge Kerry's actions in combat, the lack of liberal conspiracy is pretty evident.

4: the media is controlled by a profit motive. end of story. Whenever profit becomes central and truth, health, well being become secondary, bad shit happens. We have a corporate profit driven insurance, media, health care, and housing complex that doesn't *care* about right and wrong, health and welfare of people. Adam Smith and Thomas Jefferson were both VERY clear on this. If you think of the media as coporate instead of somehow marxist liberal (is to laugh) then a lot more becomes clear.

Card isn't entirely wrong, the reporting on many things has sucked wind. But to ignore everything that happens that isn't damaging to a certain subset of the right to try and convince yourself that there's a liberal conspiracy is silly. Analyze ALL the data.

Wrong.

[zeekar.livejournal.com]

What he has to say on this particular issue sounds like he's reading off Sarah Palin's talking-point cue cards.

See http://www.mcclatchydc.com/251/story/53802.html for debunkage.