Category: Hack Journalism

Your Liberal Media

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You may have heard a minor media sh%$storm about an OMB report that says that global warming is a farce, and that it will wreck the economy.

Only the report is not a report, it’s just a collection of various opinions from other agencies that the OMB passes on without comment, and it’s just one comment.

And the comment, it came from the Small Business Administration’s Office of Advocacy, an office whose only job is to lobby for small businesses, and which has no professional staff, only political appointees.

In this case, the political appointee in question was Joseph Johnson, a former member of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, which is another right wing funded front. See also here if you can stomach a Glen Beck video.

Needless to say, this did not prevent the New York Times from mindlessly echoing all the spin (also here), along with the rest of usual suspects.

Of course, it took a bunch of couple DFH* bloggers at The Atlantic and Media Matters about a half day to get to the bottom of this, but our main stream media?

Not so much.

*Dirty F%$#ing Hippy.

Friends Don’t Let Friends Pledge to NPR

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There is a documentary out called Outrage about closeted gay politicians, and NPR did a review, and upper management rewrote it to specifically exclude the names to two politicians, Florida Governor Charlie Crist and Senator Larry Craig, from the review, which so outraged the author that he removed his byline from it. (His story had been written with close consultation of his editor)

As Pam Spalding notes, “NPR has no business tossing out the “privacy” card when it couldn’t resist deeming John Edwards’s heterosexual tomcatting newsworthy, underscoring that there were legitimate political reasons for the reporting.”

If I weren’t not giving because of their vociferous opposition to low power local broadcasts, I would not give to them because they have been completely captured by the sensibilities of the “inside the Beltway” crowd.

Economics Update

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Surprise, surprise, the press is noticing that foreclosures are no longer just some sort of phenomenon effecting poor people who got subprime loans:

Chuck Dayton put down a quarter of the $950,000 purchase price when he bought his house in Newport Beach, Calif., in 2004. He was making $500,000 a year with his drywall company and he expected home values to keep rising.

Then the mortgage market collapsed, new construction stopped and builders no longer needed his services. Dayton, 43, went into default four months ago because he couldn’t afford payments on the three-bedroom home, located within a block of the Pacific Ocean. He hopes his lender will agree to sell the seven-year-old house for less than he owes to avoid a foreclosure.

This is then followed by a a number of refis to take out equity, and a negative amortization loan.

A bubble market, with toxic products feeding the frenzy. No wonder Zillow dot com just completed a survey showing that ¼ of home owners are under water.

Even those who followed the old rules, 20% down and 30 year fixed, ended up buying into the appreciation story, with refinancing and exotic mortgages creeping into their home values.

And while fear fear has temporarily put a halt to the worst excesses, the declining job market, continues to mean that these people will stay under water.

The most recent reports, private ones from payroll check processor ADP, and the rather Dickensianly named outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas, don’t show a turnaround, though in a classic bit of journamalism, the fact that private sector employment fell by 491,000 is somehow good news.

Meanwhile in currency, the dollar weakened slightly, largely on uncertainty about both what the ECB will do the Euro rate, and the results of the banking stress test (more on that later).

In energy, both oil and natural gas were up, oil to a 5 month high, and the largest single day increase for natural gas in 2 months.

Economics Update

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Graph courtesy of Wikipedia

Well, we have some legitimately good news, that the Conference Board’s Consumer Confidence Index rose to 39.2 in April, a 12.3 point gain from March, though with the rather neutral year of 1985 being indexed to 100, 39.2 still sucks, as is clear from the graph.

Additionally, while the home prices continued to fall, they are falling at a slightly slower rate, or as Atrios so amusingly notes, “Positive 2nd Derivative!!!“*

House prices are still falling, and the rate of decline is the noisiest metric, unless you want to do the change in rate of decline (unless you want to go to something like the 3rd derivative, called “jerk” when dealing with motion).

I would wait and see for a few months before jumping back into the market.

Meanwhile, the flu concerns continue to push oil down, though the positive economic data above has driven the dollar down too, because there is less of a flight to safety.

*If you don’t get the joke because you are not a math geek, don’t despair….At least you are not a math geek, which has to count for something.

Fun and Games With Bad Financial Reporting

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I’ve included some graph pr0n to show just what the innumerate folks in the 4th estate have been doing.

We have a rather good article by Diana Olick, who explains that the bump in house prices reported yesterday were a mirage.

Basically, at different times of the years, different people look for different homes, and these different people buy different sorts of houses:

All that said, the Realtors, in a twist, decided to give the month-to-month home price changes today, because it offered, as chief economist Lawrence Yun suggested, hope of a possible “green chute.” Existing home prices rose 4 percent from February to March, according to the Realtors. Now, if you were listening before, you would say, ok, that’s because the families are getting into the spring game. But Mr. Yun points out that the usual bump up in spring prices is about 1 percent, so the 4 percent monthly bump up should be a good sign. I’m not going to argue with that, because it makes sense to me

But still, we get crap like, “New home sales down, but show sign of revival“,and “Drop in new U.S. home inventories offers hope“, which ignore basic facts.

New home inventories are down because developers cannot compete against foreclosures and short sales, which are nearly half the market, and the fact that the numbers dropping, but “exceeding” forecasts generally ignores the fact that the forecasters have gotten the entire housing market wrong.

As Barry Righoltz notes, the real number is that new home sales fell 41% YoY in February 2009, though the margin of error is ±7.9%, it’s indisputably a drop.

The 4.7% month to month increase against an ±18.3% margin of error (!) means nothing. (link to the Census Bureau Data)

BTW, the top graph, the one that even the most mathematically inept person in journalism could use to figure this out, is in the Census Bureau report.

And then we have this report on durable goods orders, which again claims that, “Orders for U.S. Durable Goods Fall Less Than Forecast,” using a different set of data from the Census Bureau, but using a similarly clueless group of economists to show that it “beat expectations”

http://img141.imageshack.us/img141/7573/headsmashkeyboard112129.gifOnly, as you can see from the graph, new orders are down 27% year over year, (graph courtesy of Bonddad) but we still have to see that, “Prosperity is just around the corner.”

Gah!!!!!

Adventures in Economic Journamalism

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In this case, it’s Douglas McIntyre of Time Magazine, who looks at a positive quarterly report from Wells Fargo, so he looks at the big sh$&pile, and thinks that there is a pony in there,thus declaring that the banking crisis to be over.

Not unsurprisingly, this ignores the the backdoor bailout through AIG, the fact Wells is deriving profits from a special tax loophole that allows it to write off WaMu’s old losses, that Wells is rather healthy by the standards of the big banks, and the fact that their worthless assets effect solvency, not quarterly profit statements.

Making a quarterly profit is easy for a bank that is not writing down bad loans as it is supposed to.

Posted via mobile phone.

Whiners

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Specifically the New York Times reporters covering the press conference:

This was Mr. Obama as more enervating than energizing, a reminder of the way he could be in his early days as a presidential candidate, before he became defined by rapturous crowds.

Hmmm…I wonder why they are so down on the press conference>

He showed his usual comfort with a wide array of subjects, even as he excluded the nation’s big newspapers from the questioning in favor of a more eclectic mix.

Oh my God! He did not ask a New York Times reporter a question. We are masters of the universe! How dare he!

What a bunch of self absorbed pratts.

Self-Important Wankers

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It appears that the members of the Washington, DC press corps are miffed because Barack Obama won’t be attending their annual Gridiron dinner:

But some Gridiron veterans make clear they don’t understand. Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page said, “People feel uncommonly saddened, miffed and burned.

“I don’t think he understands the implications of not coming to the club in the first year. It’s not your ordinary state dinner. I think it would be helpful for him and his relations with the Washington establishment to come to the club.”

Mr. Page, by “some people”, you mean “Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page,” and you need to get over yourself.

Beyond bruised feelings among the pundit class, Obama’s snub is a revealing cultural moment.

Gridiron has for decades been an inner sanctum of Washington’s political press corps. The club’s mostly aging members were considered highly prestigious because they said so — and because they had the ability to summon the capital’s political elite to a spring frolic of skits and songs.

But if a young and glamorous president decides he can afford to blow off an august and tradition-bound institution, one has to at least entertain the possibility that this institution may not be quite as august as its members assumed.

It never was anything but a mutual masturbation society.

Obama decided that spending spring break with his girls was more important, so good for him.

NPR Ombud Sick of Fox News Juan Williams

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Well, the NPR Ombudsman has taken to completely disavowing anything Juan Williams says when he is on Fox News, and has notified her readers that, “NPR’s Vice President of News, Ellen Weiss, has asked Williams to ask that Fox remove his NPR identification whenever he is on O’Reilly.”

You see, when someone says that Michelle Obama has, “this Stokely Carmichael in a designer dress thing going,” people tend to think that he’s not a functioning journalist.

The truth is that he hasn’t been one for a long time, when he led the lynch mob against Anita Hill, and neglected to mention that he had repeated allegations of sexual harassment against him, he stopped being a journalist.

Currently he’s a freelancer, as the ombud made abundantly clear:

His “Stokely Carmichael” comment got the attention of NPR’s top managers. They are in a bind because Williams is no longer a staff employee but an independent contractor. As a contract news analyst, NPR doesn’t exercise control over what Williams says outside of NPR.

When he wasn’t, he was for a brief period on Talk of the Nation, but proved too damn stupid to handle the interviews….The show is on today, and it can still be lame, but he was painful to listen to.

The problem here is not that he’s on Fox News, so is Mara Liasson, it’s that he’s on O’Reilly, and he’s stupid, and he’s very eager to please, you could use Dr. Boyce Watkins term to describe him, but that brings in race, and I think to Fox and O’Reilly, it’s more important that he’s “NPR” than that he’s black.

The Google Kerfluffle

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So, we have The Wall Street Journal doing a story with a screaming headline about how Google is attempting to subvert network neutrality.

Note that the Journal‘s editorial page has long argued against network neutrality, and Google has long championed the idea that ISPs should act as common carriers.

Well, they note one of Google’s main allies, Larry Lessig, has shifted his position to match Google’s, which he shows (with footnotes) to be wrong.

Then Google explains that what it is doing is placing caching servers to better response time, not buying enhanced access to the last mile of wiring to the home.

It’s called “edge caching”, and Akamai has been doing since 1998.

While Google’s actions might be troubling to Akamai, they would likely see a huge new competitor in this market, this is nothing new.

Additionally, the article claims that Obama and his people are walking backwards from their commitment to network neutrality, a charge which they unequivocally deny.

We also have Wired.com calling bullsh$# too.

And finally, if you need any more convincing, isen.blog plucks this little jewel from the article:

One major cable operator in talks with Google says it has been reluctant so far to strike a deal because of concern it might violate Federal Communications Commission guidelines on network neutrality.

“If we did this, Washington would be on fire,” says one executive at the cable company who is familiar with the talks, referring to the likely reaction of regulators and lawmakers.

As David Isenberg so rightly notes, “Yeah, right, the cable guys want to preserve Network Neutrality, while Google wants to violate it. That **would** be a boy-bites-dog story, if it were true.” (emphasis original)

Additionally, he makes some good notes on the regulations on this:

Google’s FCC counsel, Rick Whitt explains that Google simply seeks to do edge caching, just like Akamai, Amazon, and several other companies. The idea of edge caching is to locate frequently used content closer to the people who access it. It makes accessing the cached content faster.

Importantly, since the cache must be connected to the Internet by a big, fat, stupid [emphasis mine] pipe, the company doing the caching can, in principle, buy pipes from any carrier. Indeed, if it is concerned with up-time, local congestion, or avoiding single points of failure, it will buy connections from several providers. [See my “Buy as Many Nines as you Need“]

Also, in principle, carriers can let any edge cache access its network. Indeed they have a duty to do so, under the Doctrine of Public Callings, the doctrine of common law that underlies common carriage and network neutrality that has been in effect for about 900 years now. [emphasis mine]

Net Neutrality only becomes an issue when a carrier picks and chooses which cache to supply pipes to.

The argument the WSJ seems to be making — and they don’t make it very well — is that when Google has an arrangement with carriers to provide a cache it advantages its access. However, it has always been the case that Google pay a carrier more for a fatter pipe to its content. Edge caching is another case of that, no matter in which building a caching platform might be located.

In other words, if Google does edge caching it buys access. It’s the same as when I, as a residential customer, pay $34.95 for one megabit DSL service or $49.95 for 3 megabit DSL.

The concern of Network Neutrality advocates is not with access but with delivery. The fear is that Internet connection providers would charge for expedited delivery of certain content to the end user, and in so doing would put themselves in the business of classifying which content gets enhanced delivery. Since they were charging for expedited delivery, they’d get more revenue for improving the enhanced delivery, so the only network upgrades would be for the enhanced service. Non-enhanced would fall further and further behind. Plus the power to decide what gets delivered might, indeed, be powerful, and power corrupts; just ask NARAL.

(NARAL was denied the ability to send text message alerts to people who had opted in to by Verizon wireless, because abortion rights are icky.)

More Economic Journamalism

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So here we have a story on the brighter side of a near complete collapse of our credit system, which opens with this ‘graph”

Dec. 15 (Bloomberg) — Bill Clinton was forced to abandon spending initiatives to boost the economy at the start of his presidency when advisers warned him that the borrowing needed to fund the programs would push interest rates higher. President- elect Barack Obama may not have the same problem.

No, he was forced to back off those initiatives because Alan Greenspan threatened crushing interest rate increases if Clinton actually tried fiscal stimulus, because he opposed such policy on philosophical grounds.

To suggest anything else means that you are a liar or too stupid to cut your own meat.

Economic Journamalism

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First we have economist Dean Baker makes the observation that the gross number is driven largely by utilities, and consumption of utilities is driven by weather, which is what typically happens in November relative to October.

Then he notes that frequently when a month is revised downward, it makes the next month looks better, which is what did happen this October.

But still we get stories like this headline, “Manufacturing Still Dismal, But Not as Bad as Feared.”

Wanker of the Day: The Always Reliable Shailagh Murray

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Quoth the Murray

The Republicans are responding in a totally reasonable way — they are wildly overreacting and hoping the facts catch up with their hyperbole. There isn’t a reasonable person around who thinks this scandal will taint Obama in any meaningful way, but at the very least, it reminds people of the political world from whence he came. This story could be a useful preamble to something bigger down the road. I’m not saying it will turn out that way, but you have to push. The same way the Dems are pushing on Coleman in Minnesota right now.

Except, of course, the FBI is investigating Norm Coleman, and there are suspicious transfers both of money and items to him and his wife, and nothing about Coleman makes it past page A11.

As versus a statement from the US Attorney Patrick Fitzgerald in which he categorically states that no one from the Obama campaign is involved, most likely because it was someone from the Obama campaign who dropped a dime on Governor Impossible Hair.

She was alleged to have teared up at Ted Stevens’ valedictory speech to the Senate (though the never reliable Dana Milbank now puts it off to allergies, which Murray says she never had), so she’s gone native, as have far too many of the WaPo staff.

When all is said and done, Washington, DC is a small, one industry town, and everyone goes to the same parties (except, of course for the black majority of the population), and we get crony journalism.

Interesting Juxtaposition in the Media Coverage of Africa

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We have this story alleging that Rwanda is behind the insurgency in the east of Congo, and we have this story discussing negotiations between the governments of Rwanda and Congo to disband the FDLR militias.

The Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Rwanda (FDLR), are the genocidal criminals who massacred a significant portion of the Rwandan Tutsi population, and once driven from the country, set themselves up in “refugee camps” where their basic food and nature needs are provided for by the UN and NGOs, and have continued to wage genocidal campaigns against Tutsis, both in Congo and Rwanda.

A first step to fixing this is to close down the camps, and considering that the Tutsis have not engaged in mass reprisals in the 18 years since the genocide, these camps are not needed.

As to how to close down the camps? That’s simple, just stop delivering supplies.

Bad Financial Journalism

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So, here we see the artcle based on data from the National Association of Realtors (NAR), an organization whose statements should trigger very loud bullsh^% alert titled, “U.S. Home Resales Rose in September to One-Year High.”

Noting that home sales grew 5.1% from in September, 2008 as compared to August 2008.

The housing crash is over…Let the rejoicing begin!!!!!

Bad Journalism…the real story is that, “Foreclosure-related sales accounted for 35 percent to 40 percent of last month’s total,” and that’s the NAR’s, whose job is to lie like a rug present a rosy estimate.

But Mr. Morggage of the Mortgage Lender Implode-O-Meter notes that actual existing home sales are down, the month to month is created by seasonal sdjustments, and seasonal markets only should be applied to a stable market, not one in free fall.

By his figuring, existing home sales fell by 9.6% between August and September.

Me, I’d split the difference, which gives us (5.1%-9.6%)/2 or a drop of 2.05% for no reason at all. I pulled the equation out of my overly ample ass.

See table pron below.


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