Ready, aim, fire
I swear, there are times when I believe the newspaper industry gets up every morning determined to shoot itself in the foot even more grievously than it did the day before. Case in point: This Associated Press story headlined “5 reasons for housing crash,” which I found in my Monday morning paper.
The story’s a mess, from top to bottom. For starters, the headline doesn’t match up with the “nut graf” — the industry term for the paragraph containing the essential kernel of the article. In this case, that pivotal paragraph asks:
So why is the foreclosure crisis so hard to fix?
You might think you’re getting a forward-looking explanation of the task ahead, but in fact the article only offers a rehash of the factors that got us into the crisis. It never gets around to answering, with any real specificity, the very question it poses (but giving a bad headline the virtue of being inadvertently on point). More incredibly, the story’s complete explanation of the core factor in the crisis is this:
Traditionally, lenders evaluated borrowers carefully because the lenders held the mortgages for the life of the loan. That process started to change in the late ’80s, as Wall Street found new ways to package the loans into securities to sell to investors.
Investors were attracted to these new mortgage-backed securities because they paid better returns than government bonds.
At the beginning of this decade, the Federal Reserve started cutting interest rates to historic lows. So investors poured money into the U.S. mortgage market, particularly into securities made up of high-interest mortgages made to borrowers with poor credit.
These “subprime” mortgages boomed, from $160 billion in new loans in 2001 to $600 billion in both 2005 and 2006, according to Inside Mortgage Finance.
Lenders stopped worrying about the creditworthiness of borrowers and offered them riskier mortgages. Most of those loans were made by commission-driven mortgage brokers, who had nothing to lose if the mortgage went bad because it had been resold.
Evidently, government policies which encouraged lenders to make mortgages available to credit-impaired buyers weren’t a factor. Neither were Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the allegedly independent institutions that the government used to vacuum up those subprime loans and turn them into securities to be sold to investors. How does anyone write about the mortgage crisis without even mentioning those things?
But I’ll give the story’s author credit for being bipartisan in his cluelessness. He also doesn’t devote so much as a word to deregulation of the financial industry, which Democrats have seized upon with the same vigor shown by Republicans who cite the aforementioned government policies.
This journalistic train wreck made it through the editing gauntlet at AP, then was deemed sufficiently thorough and thought-provoking for editors at the News & Observer to OK its publication. Thus was readers’ faith in the journalism industry tested yet again.
October 28th, 2008 at 8:44 am
I stopped reading the story before I was through the first paragraph. It was some of the worst writing I’ve seen in the N&O in a long time. The headline didn’t help. Anyway, I’ve thought they needed new headline writers for some time now. Whoever came up with the internal, not to be published “Trees 2, Politicians 0″ headline, for a story on the skiing deaths of Sonny Bono and that Kennedy whose name I forget, should be given the job.
October 28th, 2008 at 9:23 am
Hahahaha. I like THAT headline. I realize the N&O is going through some tough times but they need to figure out ways to keep their best staff intact. A quick way to go out of business would be to let their worst writers stay because they have a smaller paycheck.
October 28th, 2008 at 9:58 am
In your next to last sentence you offered us an incredible double oxymoron, perhaps intentionally:
“This journalistic train wreck made it through the editing gauntlet at AP, then was deemed sufficiently thorough and thought-provoking for editors at the News & Observer to OK its publication.”
October 28th, 2008 at 11:13 am
I expect most of us who read the paper ain’t published authors or journalists. As such, I don’t hold this guy’s effort in the same low esteem as do you guys.
Seemed a reasonably informative article. If the headline was off point and the if the content reflects a pedestrian grasp of Journalism 101, well, then, I’ll just be damned.
Who do you guys think reads the daily, hometown rag anyway? Do I need to rant about the common man again? I’ll do it. You know I will.
Can you see Joe The Plumber choking on his Post Toasties in reaction to “5 reasons for the housing crash”? I can’t. I’m with Joe.
October 28th, 2008 at 11:29 am
TO John—
You’re so condescending.
Although the average person walking down the street has very little taste at all, I don’t think you give him/her enough credit for picking up on shoddy reporting.
Hmmm…….when contemplating the strange, I often think I should have gone over and applied for a position at the N&O long ago.
Rapier wit and artistically designed eye-grabbing headlines might have stopped some of the current bleeding.
“We can’t bring back the hour of splendor in the grass…..”
October 28th, 2008 at 12:07 pm
I don’t know about condescending - not sure what it means in this context.
SUGGESTION TO THE BLOGMASTER: How about a link to a dictionary and thesauras?
Maybe I do project onto others my own lack of discrimination about matters esoteric. Forgive me Debrah, for I have sinned. In pennance, I’ll scratch myself in places unmentionable in mixed company then vigorously break wind - whooo! That’s a bad one.
And in the spirit of constructive criticism. I can’t believe you mentioned a Melissa-freaking-Manchester song in one of your previous posts to a previous, G. Dan blog. “Don’t Cry Out Loud”. Talk about schmaltz.
I figgered you more for a Sondheim kinda gal - maybe with a little Twisted Sister tossed in just to keep everybody guessing.
DONT’ CRY OUT LOUD!
JUST KEEP IT INSIDE
AND LEARN HOW TO HIDE YOUR FEELINGS.
FLY HIGH AND PROUD.
AND IF YOU SHOULD FALL.
REMEMBER, YOU ALMOST HAD IT ALL.
Let’s hold this treacle up to the same scrutiny as the “5 reasons” article. Are there any music lovers in the house?
October 28th, 2008 at 12:45 pm
DCOL is one of those songs college girls of the late 70’s played over and over again in the privacy of their dorm room after their boyfriend dumped them.
It’s a weepy and self-pitying piece of fluff that made the future contributions of nancy boys like Air Supply sound like Bachman Turner Overdrive by comparison.
Melissa Manchester wrote commercial jingles for feminine hygiene products - turns out that was her best work.
How about some love for a real artiste: Loudon Wainwright, III? Now there’s a songwriter/performer.
DISCLAIMER: I, Music Lover, have no idea what Melissa Manchester did before she wrote DON’T CRY OUT LOUD. In fact, I’m not even sure she wrote the song. But if she didn’t, that begs the question WHY IN THE HECK WOULD SHE AGREE TO RECORD A POS LIKE THAT?
Extortion perhaps. Yeah, suppose the guy with actual rights to the song had something embarrassing on Melissa? Y’know, like maybe she faked her transcript to get into Juliard. Yeah. That could be it.
If so, then it makes more sense to me, Music Lover, that she perpetrated the song herself.
Scott Baio is the antichrist! Who stole my meds?
October 28th, 2008 at 1:16 pm
What’s all this “awaiting moderation” stuff? I’ve neve been moderated in my life. I’m not fixing to start now. Gearino, you don’t want to mess with me, Music Lover, believe me.
You seen your parakeet, Snickers, today? No? You wanna guess why? You wanna take a stab at Snicker’s current whereabouts? That’s right, he (or she, I can’t freaking tell - although the name Snickers is sorta fruity for a male bird) is perched right here next to me as I type this note.
What do you feed this critter? I’ve never seen so much guano in my life -and I’m pretty much of an expert on guano - kinda like Brunette and roadkill - I flatter myself.
And the point of mentioning your parakeet or cockateil or whatever is to imply some kind of ill fate befalling it if you don’t grease the skids on my moderation process.
October 29th, 2008 at 12:54 am
John–
Sorry you misread my mention of “Don’t Cry Out Loud”.
I honestly never listened to the song.
And certainly not in some dorm room.
Someone referenced that tune—a music executive with Alfa Records which was a subsidiary of what was A&M—back in the ’80s when I was living in Tokyo for a few years.
He said that the Boz Scaggs tune should be the anthem for the Japanese people because they never want to show their true feelings, always “save face”, and just basically hold things inside.
This guy was frustrated that Japanese artists were copying too much of what we do.
That’s all the song means to me.
And yes, I like Sondheim.
I can do a mean “Send in the Clowns”, but I’m into lots of different styles of music.
:>)