Media and Communications Policy : Media Policy & First Amendment Foundation : The Media Institute : Free Speech, Media Regulation, Content Controls

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Even as it’s come under the inevitable attack by ideologues of the left, and even a few on the right, the lessons in New York Times reporter Gretchen Morgenson’s book, Reckless Endangerment, resonate. More than this, they provide the stuff for some interesting speculation, none more important, for those of us in “medialand,” than this: Why didn’t the media shine a bright light on the perfidy of Fannie Mae and its “paid clappers” in academia and Congress (people like Joseph Stiglitz and Barney Frank) before now?

Could it be, as one may infer from what Morgenson reports, because the company at the center of the story had contrived to promote itself – in language that was politically correct but deeply misleading – as a high-minded enabler of home ownership for minority and lower-income citizens?

And if it’s true that investigative and political reporters, working for mainstream news organizations, were anesthetized by that kind of sloganeering, even in a case as egregious as the Fannie Mae fiasco, why would anyone think that “progressive” nonprofit news organizations would cover such a story – then, now, or in the future?  Organizations, for instance, like ProPublica that, founded, chaired, and bankrolled by a man as liberal as he is wealthy, sees its mission as “shining a light on the exploitation of the weak by the strong.”

For the benefit of those who haven’t yet read it, Reckless Endangerment is, most importantly, the story of the role in the country’s economic meltdown played by the government-sponsored enterprise (GSE) known as Fannie Mae.

Created in 1938 to assist borrowers in buying homes during the waning days of the Great Depression, decades later Fannie Mae would become, in Morgenson’s words, “the largest and most powerful financial institution in the world.”  And size wasn’t its only defining characteristic.

Under the venal leadership of its former CEO, James Johnson, and his corrupt successor, Franklin Raines, Fannie Mae became the very embodiment of crony capitalism: an outfit that used its (predominantly Democratic) political muscle to gain competitive advantage and to ward off every attempt at reining in its imprudent business practices, all while hugely rewarding its senior executives. (For his service as CEO in the ’90s, James Johnson took home $100 million.) The upshot of it all?  In 2008, the Federal Housing Finance Agency took conservatorship of Fannie Mae, at a cost to taxpayers (to date, and counting) of $150 billion.

This and much more is told in stomach-turning detail in Reckless Endangerment, and as is often the case with books of great moment, it has sparked numerous discussions, some about its primary thesis, and some about matters of secondary importance.

Not to be out-marginalized, and as suggested at the outset, the interest here is with an aspect of the thing that might be said to be of “tertiary importance," connected to “Fanniegate” only obliquely: namely, what the press coverage (or more precisely, lack of coverage) of Fannie Mae suggests about future stories and the relevance of nonprofit news organizations, particularly those in the “investigative news” business.

Nonprofit news organizations are all the rage these days.  We know this because the J-schools, journalism reviews, journalism-funding foundations, and the deep thinkers at places like Politico tell us so. Indeed, there are those (most of whom are on the payroll of the movement’s principal sugar daddy, the Knight Foundation) who argue that, because of the tough times at for-profit media, the nonprofits are indispensable keepers of the journalistic flame.

It says a lot that many of the same people who sing the praises of nonprofit organizations also advocate a larger role for government in the affairs of the media. Even as “local news” and “investigative” reporting need the input of nonprofits, they argue, the nonprofits themselves need help from the government, whether in the form of much larger contributions to NPR and PBS, or such things as federal tax credits for investigative journalism.

But because, as mentioned in an earlier blog, virtually all of the nonprofit groups bring to their work a history, a mindset, a funding base, and/or a mission statement that venerates government policies that are said to be “helping people,” when such policies go wrong they are invisible to these same nonprofits.

This is true not just of issues like the corruption of Fannie Mae, but of myriad other issues, among which are some of the most pressing problems in the country today.  Things, for instance, like the Ponzi schemes that governments at all levels have been running in broad daylight with their unbalanced budgets and debt issuance. Investigative reporters could write a different piece once a week for a year or two about examples of this in the states, municipalities, and at the federal level

Or what about the ruinous effect on state and municipal finance of public employee unions’ pay and retirement packages? Or the extraordinary expense, spread across so many industries, of ambulance-chasing trial lawyers?  Or the disastrous dependency, forged after decades of government support, of people trapped in the inner cities – areas that are these days so depraved and dysfunctional Charles Dickens wouldn’t recognize them?

Concerning these and many other issues, there is no reason to believe that nonprofit news organizations out there today would show any greater interest than have the mainstream for-profit media. They largely ignored the monstrosity that was Fannie Mae when their “investigative reports” might have made a difference, and because of their prevailing mindset they will in all likelihood ignore all other issues displaying a kindred pathology.

 The opinions expressed above are those of the writer and not of The Media Institute, its Board, contributors, or advisory councils.

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Readers of this blog may remember the post in January re some of the opinions expressed immediately after the shooting in Tucson of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords.  The worst were those, by people like Slate’s Jacob Weisberg and the New York Times’ Paul Krugman, who attempted – before anything was known about the shooting – to link it to right-wing political rhetoric.

Though it turned out that the shooter, Jared Loughner, was just another nutjob with no discernible political interests (it’s always so embarrassing when that happens), people like Krugman and Weisberg carry on, unchastened.

So whereas, re the Gifford shooting, Krugman said: “Even if hate is what many want to hear, that doesn’t excuse those that pander to that desire.  They should be shunned by all decent people,” he is now saying, in columns about the debt ceiling and possibility of default, things like:

A number of commentators seem shocked at how unreasonable Republicans are being.  “Has the GOP gone insane?” they ask.  Why, yes, it has.  But this isn’t something that just happened, it’s the culmination of a process that has been going on for decades.  Anyone surprised by the extremism and irresponsibility now on display either hasn’t been paying attention, or has been deliberately turning a blind eye….

The problem with American politics right now is Republican extremism, and if you’re not willing to say that, you’re helping make that problem worse. 

Meanwhile, Jacob Weisberg, whose emanations within hours of Giffords’ shooting included a piece titled “The Tea Party and the Tucson Tragedy: How anti-government, pro-gun, xenophobic populism made the Giffords shooting more likely,” is now saying, re the debt ceiling deal:

Some of the congressional Republicans who are preventing action to help the economy are simply intellectual primitives who reject modern economics on the same basis that they reject Darwin and climate science….

At the level of political culture, we have learned some other sobering lessons: that compromise is dead and that there’s no point trying to explain complicated matters to the American people.  The president has tried reasonableness and he has failed….

A Congress dominated by mindless cannibals is now feasting on a supine president. 

One sometimes wonders what certain people were like as children, but with Weisberg and Krugman we don’t have to wonder because they’re still children.  As such, they aren’t even worth talking about, especially as there are people on the right who are every bit as juvenile.  But the difference is that the right-wingers don’t occupy such lofty, and so-called “mainstream,” positions.

For all practical purposes Paul Krugman is these days the face of the New York Times, and though Jacob Weisberg is employed by a considerably less noteworthy organization, Slate is owned by the Washington Post Co., as “mainstream” as it gets.

Like those high-frequency sounds that only dogs can hear, few people will be able to detect the value in the opinions of commentators who have such contempt for them, a thing that ought to be of concern to those people at news organizations whose business plans count on mainstream Americans as current or prospective subscribers.

The opinions expressed above are those of the writer and not of The Media Institute, its Board, contributors, or advisory councils.

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For those numerous consumers of news and opinion whose political views are right-of-center, the ideology and ubiquity of people like Glenn Beck, Matt Drudge, Rush Limbaugh, and Andy Breitbart are a breath of fresh air.  Apart from the serious stuff, some of what they do – like Breitbart roller blading through a crowd of progressive protesters, or Drudge boasting of the MSM’s efforts to get a link on his website (“they kiss the ring”) – is fun.

More than this, all four have demonstrated a substantial talent for creating commercially successful journalistic products.  In 2009, for instance, the financial website 24/7wallst.com estimated that the Drudge Report was worth $46 million.  Given that the same report, though, suggested the Huffington Post was worth only $96 million, whereas AOL paid $315 million for it just two years later, the Drudge estimate is undoubtedly on the low side.

Their personal attributes notwithstanding, however, the simple truth is that none of these gentlemen, alone or together, provides a substitute for mainstream journalism or a cure for what ails it.  In part this is because all of them engage in opinion rather than reporting – and in Drudge’s case not even his own opinion but that found in the content he aggregates.  But it’s also because, like their liberal counterparts, they address issues solely from within their own ideological constructs, with predictable if sometimes bizarre results.

Take, for instance, Glenn Beck’s absurd suggestion that Sen. Scott Brown’s joking reference to his single daughters’ “availability” was tantamount to “pimping them out.”  Or Andrew Breitbart’s careless or deliberate distortion of the words of Shirley Sherrod.  Or, these days, of the prevalence on the Drudge Report of overwrought headlines that mislead about the content of the articles to which they’re linked.

There is a place for opinion journalism, and for conservative opinion, but the great journalistic need today is for mainstream, objective news reporting.  Indeed, it is the perceived absence of objectivity among the MSM that has created the market for conservative opinion, not just among the four individuals mentioned above but in talk radio generally, at Fox News, and on the Internet.

Which is not to say that this fact is widely acknowledged.  Actually it’s never acknowledged by those people and institutions, such as J-school professors and journalists themselves, who instead follow the lead of the grant-giving groups, like the Knight Foundation, whose munificent gifts set and pay for the journalism establishment’s agenda.

So instead of spotting the journalistic elephant in the room, which is the perceived lack of objectivity (bias, to use the word most commonly employed), the journalism reviews and media critics are uniformly pushing these days the notion that journalism’s greatest need is for more “localism” and “investigative journalism.”  And if the MSM were seen to be objective players in the news business these would be good and timely ideas.  But given that they are not seen that way, the question becomes who would read or watch such stuff, or believe it if they did?

Though the mainstream media’s problems are frequently conflated, there are at least two severable parts to the whole: the business problems, which derive from the damage inflicted on the MSM’s advertising revenue by the Internet generally (and Google specifically); and those strictly journalistic problems, only some of which are a consequence of business problems that have led to downsizing.

Management of the MSM have been slow to come to grips with their business problems, but even slower to deal with their biggest journalistic problem.  Whether this is because they share and approve of the perceived bias in their newsrooms, or because of the firewall that separates the business and editorial sides at most news organizations, the damage to the MSM, to professional journalism, and to the country is palpable – and not at all relieved by the growth of the conservative commentariat.

The opinions expressed above are those of the writer and not of The Media Institute, its Board, contributors, or advisory councils.