My Kind of Journalism
One of my (arrogant) hopes for this (humble) newsletter is to make a case for better journalism and better journalism consumption. Right now our journalism is dangerously warped by the guidance we’ve all heard for more than a generation: To trust our instincts and follow our guts. This is bad. It’s undoing progress that was achieved using brains. And the job of brains is to overrule what our guts tell us, what we feel in our bones, and what our hearts want.
As a working (mostly) journalist for a good (mostly) 30 years now, I’ve tried to honor brains over instinct in my reporting. I see danger in journalism that doesn’t. Without wanting to sound too grandiose, I see it warping our culture and poisoning our politics.
The commentary that drives our civic discourse today is largely reactive. We see things that are bad and we talk about them and thus our national dialogue and priorities and values take shape around the mold to which we’re reacting. This is true even when the things we’re reacting to are genuinely dumb and bullshit and dumb.
To my mind, the challenge of good journalism has always been to identify stories and issues that are materially important, with long-term, concrete impacts on real lives. That’s the hard part.
Also the hard part is then figuring out how to tell those boring-ass systemic stories so that they’re just as compelling as the stories that appeal to our instincts. This is a challenge because the stories that appeal to our instincts are often stories that genuinely do merit attention. Just not necessarily everyone’s attention all the time everywhere.
Not every far-right fringe utterance should be national news. Not every awful thing that happens to someone ought to drive our civic discourse.
Too often, the stories our instincts gravitate toward focus us on fringe individuals (elevating them!) who have no systemic impact whatsoever (until we elevate them). Meanwhile, under our feet, seismic forces imperceptibly but very really reshape the terrain of our future.
So, until I’m back with your regular TFN on Friday, and while I struggle with guilt over not returning till then, I thought I’d take this opportunity to share with you some of the reporting I’ve done that I hope provides examples of or at least reflects the journalistic values I think we too often neglect.
That’s right, I’m doing a clip show. Like sitcoms used to whip up with “best-of” clips strung together in a flashback episode they had to jerry-rig because the star was in rehab or whatever.
Faith-Based Initiatives
One of my favorites came right after I started at Countdown with Keith Olbermann. I knew that David Kuo, a former official in Pres. George W. Bush’s Office of Faith-Based Initiatives, was coming out with a book and that 60 Minutes was profiling him. I also knew — forgive my hubris — that they were gonna blow it. Here’s what I mean…
Kuo had been coyly critical of the faith-based stuff. Very coy, but I could smell he had something he wanted to say. So I was eager to learn the details. But Kuo was something else, too. He was dying.
And I could tell from the tenor of the 60 Minutes promotions that their report wasn’t going to focus on his whistleblowing but on the personal journey leading to his last breaths. In other words, they would focus on the personal rather than systemic.
So our team managed to get a copy of Kuo’s book before it came out and I read it overnight and…reader…it was good.
Here’s the article I wrote about the book. And here’s Keith’s segment that we did on it. And for you true history buffs/masochists, here’s Part 2.
BTS Kuo actually called the Countdown office after we started revealing stuff from his book. He told a co-worker he didn’t know whether to punch us in the nose (for messing up the book’s rollout plan) or thank us. Why thank us? Because we focused on the substance that he wanted to get out there. Supposedly, because we had reframed the story, 60 Minutes felt compelled to redo their package to address the substantive issues we had put at the forefront. (Belated apologies to the editors and producers.)
It’s not the only time I’ve found that both the secularists and the evangelicals agree that we should be talking about the substantive, important shit — while a mushy middle lingers on the gossipy, quotidian political bullshit.
The Economic Meltdown
…aka, 60 Minutes gets its revenge.
A couple years after the Kuo story, the economy made a poopy-burger in its global panty-wanties. Massive banks came tumbling down like that other thing that happened on Bush’s watch.
I distinctly remember (which doesn’t happen a lot) sitting at my desk at Countdown and looking up when I heard Bush on TV talking about the reason this was happening. He blamed irresponsible homeowners. People, in other words, who took out loans they couldn’t afford.
This struck me for a couple reasons. One was that I had just done that. My wife and I rented in New York City and frankly couldn’t afford to (a) buy in the city or (b) continue renting, which means not investing in a property you can someday sell. So we had bought a home — because with home prices rising we literally thought it was our last chance. So even though we hadn’t defaulted, we had been part of the same home-buying rush Bush was now blaming. But I was struck by Bush’s remark for another reason, as well…
It was prima facie bullshit. Mortgage-irresponsibility isn’t a virus that randomly becomes epidemic. Even as a fiscal illiterate, I knew there had to be a systemic reason that suddenly lots of people were borrowing irresponsibly. At the time, there were two theories.
One, from the right, was a classic that gets trotted out for pretty much any problem: Blame Black people. And blame policies that seek to redress discrimination.
In this scenario, the global economy crashed because the government made banks give too many loans to Black people who obviously couldn’t afford them and whose defaults were obviously to blame for the global economic collapse. Never mind the infinitesimal portion of global debt or defaults held by Black American homebuyers.
On the left, economists were pointing out that the collapse had been a predicted result of Wall Street deregulation. This theory had the advantage of being both (a) right and (b) not racist. When Wall Street successfully killed old banking rules, Wall Street firms could now take a home loan — meaning, the debt some irresponsible homebuyer owed to that firm — and chop it up and sell it off. So now pieces of that debt were owned by lots of different firms.
Over time, so many loans got chopped up into so many pieces and mixed up with so many pieces of other loans ... that eventually no one could keep track of which loan pieces came from risky loans. It was all just loan goulash. Soon, these helpings of loan stew were getting bought and sold and traded as if there were no risky loans in the ingredients. Which meant that risky loans were now effectively just as valuable as strong loans — because you could chop them up and use them as filler in your loan goulash.
At that point, banks had a massive incentive to make as many loans as possible, no matter how shitty. That’s why borrowers came down with an epidemic of “irresponsible” borrowing — banks were pushing everyone to borrow.
If you’re still reading this, you know how much I’ve struggled to somehow make interesting the actions that torpedoed the global economy and led to multiple suicides and massive layoffs. Well, that was my challenge at Countdown, too.
Luckily, I found a guy who:
Had helped rewrite the rules to make this all happen in the first place,
Was now lobbying for the banking industry that was responsible … in order to help them clean up even more from the federal cleanup, and…
Was also the lead economic advisor for the Republican presidential candidate.
His name was Phil Gramm, the former senator. And I used his story to tell the systemic story of the irresponsible-borrowers epidemic. Here’s the article I wrote and here’s Keith’s segment on it.
Oh, and the reason I call this 60 Minutes’ revenge is that, like a year after I did the Gramm stuff to explain the meltdown, 60 Minutes did a piece explaining the meltdown that won all kinds of awards and shit. So suck it, me, I guess.
As it turned out, Gramm would be the star player of another story Keith and I did… and I’ll share that one tomorrow….
Your regular TFN will return on Friday. And I’ve got new, original reporting coming! In the meantime, please consider becoming a paid subscriber so I can keep my original reporting and the newsletter free for everyone.
Of course Larsen is right on. I haven't finished reading this piece, but after having to listen to my uncle's Fox News (really?) for hours on end the normal network news seems heroic. Fox & their like networks have thoroughly brainwashed and manipulated their market into true believers who are convinced that they are the enlightened.
The solution politicians came up with was bail out the banks, the perpetrators of this fiasco leaving the borrowers, the victims, to fend for themselves. Many of the borrowers lost everything. Corporate capitalism at its finest.