The Press

People Magazine or WSJ?

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In Friday’s Wall Street Journal was an article titled “The Accidental Renters” with the subtitle “After Losing Homes to Foreclosure, Tight Rental Market Poses More Indignities”. The article ostensibly covers the difficulties that people who lost lost their homes face trying to rent.

It is incomprehensible to me how the WSJ, which usually is a very well written newspaper, occasionally slips in an article so badly written, conceived and executed that I think I am reading People magazine. Isn’t that why they have editors? Let’s take this apart…

The most typical flaw of mainstream journalism in my opinion is 1) “humanizing” a complex problem with a few interviews or out of context “examples” 2) not challenging basic flaws in logic in these “examples” 3) failing to add a knowledgeable and topic-based analysis of the facts at hand based on experience.

Here are the examples in the article:

“Ray and Trish Vangas recently found themselves contending with the indignities of renting. The couple lost their first home… after their adjustable rate mortgage reset and the bill jumped by about $900 a month, to $3300… the couple moved into a rented townhouse… almost immediately, they discovered problems, including a deck that wobbled, dead electrical outlets, missing smoke detectors, and bad plumbing. With the help of the town’s health department they moved out… paying $2250 a month. “I can’t believe I worked so hard for a house, only to lose it.”

The interviewer never takes the Vangas to task for their obvious mistakes. They picked up an adjustable rate mortgage which was scheduled to reset to a level of payments that they could not afford. Why did they do this? And the odd part is that the mortgage didn’t reset very far – it moved from $2400 to $3300, a large but seemingly manageable increase. Were they living that close to the edge? The article doesn’t mention them losing a job or suffering any sort of financial crisis, so that doesn’t seem to be an explanation.

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Just in Time for the Beijing Olympics

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The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has an online exhibition about the 1936 Nazi Olympics:

In August 1936, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi dictatorship scored a huge propaganda success as host of the Summer Olympics in Berlin. The Games were a brief, two-week interlude in Germany’s escalating campaign against its Jewish population and the country’s march toward war. This site explores the issues surrounding the 1936 Olympic Games—the Nazis’ use of propaganda, the intense boycott debate, the history of the torch run, the historic performance of Jesse Owens, and more.

Change a few names and nouns and the above description fits the 2008 Olympics rather closely, no? Congratulations to the USHMM on its fine sense of timing. Let’s hope that the Chinese government benefits less from the 2008 games than Hitler did from the ones in 1936.

Chicago Tribune and Gun Control

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The definition of journalism from an online dictionary:

2 a: writing designed for publication in a newspaper or magazine b: writing characterized by a direct presentation of facts or description of events without an attempt at interpretation c: writing designed to appeal to current popular taste or public interest

For this purpose, I am going to discuss b: writing characterized by a direct presentation of facts or description of events without an attempt at interpretation.


Today the front page of the Chicago Tribune described what happened to a poor, innocent woman who was shot down at her place of business in Elmhurst, IL. The headline is “The Law Didn’t Save Her” with the tag line “She tried a court order. She had him arrested. She took all the legal steps she could right up to the day her ex-boyfriend shot her dead in the parking lot.”

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Those that can’t… consult

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Periodically I can’t resist poking fun at “traditional” journalism, where they take a simple thesis, “humanize” it with an interview of example, and then roll to a simple conclusion. The conclusion is often driven by the all-too linear narrator, who tells a story that is supplanted by corroborating facts.

In the usually-vapid managing your career section in the WSJ (these sections are much less illuminating than their hard-news elements) a recent article was titled “How one executive used a sabbatical to fix his career“.

While the article ostensibly showed the linear story of a person who was 1) having a hard time with their career 2) took a sabbatical 3) then performed better, the real story “behind the scenes” was much more interesting. Let’s review…

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