{"id":186157,"date":"2014-04-21T18:35:00","date_gmt":"2014-04-21T23:35:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/04\/21\/times-ombud-calls-out-shoddy-financial-reporting\/"},"modified":"2014-04-21T18:35:00","modified_gmt":"2014-04-21T23:35:00","slug":"times-ombud-calls-out-shoddy-financial-reporting","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2014\/04\/21\/times-ombud-calls-out-shoddy-financial-reporting\/","title":{"rendered":"Times Ombud Calls Out Shoddy Financial Reporting"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The <i>New York Times<\/i> public editor Margaret Sullivan criticizes their coverage of Bank of America&#8217;s latest financial results, because <a href=\"http:\/\/publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com\/2014\/04\/21\/banking-troubles-but-not-a-word-about-fraud-claims\/\">they completely ignored the massive fines for fraud<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\">Reading The Times\u2019s coverage of Bank of America\u2019s quarterly loss last week, I almost felt sorry for the financial behemoth. It has mortgage troubles, you see. It has onerous legal costs.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u201cThe disappointing news shows how Bank of America is still paying for its mortgage problems nearly six years after the financial crisis,\u201d the article said.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">I thought of sending a small check to help or at least conveying my sympathy.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">I really should have remembered what this is all about because it was only last month that Bank of America settled a lawsuit that claimed the bank had committed mortgage fraud. The cost of the settlement? More than $9 billion. Bank of America was one of the banks that sold mortgage securities backed by subprime mortgages, which went south during the housing and financial crises \u2013 in many cases driving American consumers into financial ruin.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Some Times readers wrote to me about it, pointing out that there was more to the story. They hadn\u2019t forgotten what happened, it seemed. Jamison Wilcox, for example, noted in an email that he was \u201cdismayed to see the term \u2018legal costs\u2019 given a vague and euphemistic meaning \u2013 and repeated in a headline \u2013 as a short replacement for the specific identification of monies paid out \u2026 as a legal consequence of wrongful conduct by a corporation or bank.\u201d<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">\u2026\u2026\u2026<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">The language certainly isn\u2019t overheated. In fact, nowhere in this article is there any straightforward mention of what really caused these legal troubles and costs.<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">It says only this: \u201cAt the heart of the additional legal expenses was a $6.3 billion settlement that the bank announced last month to settle a lawsuit arising from troubled mortgage-backed securities it bundled and sold to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac before the financial crisis.\u201d (The bank also agreed to buy back $3.2 billion in mortgage securities, bringing the penalties to $9.5 billion.)<\/span><br \/><span style=\"color: blue;\"><br \/><\/span><span style=\"color: blue;\">Bundles and troubles and costs, yes. Fraud accusations, not so much.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I do not think that this will make a difference, though.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan criticizes their coverage of Bank of America&#8217;s latest financial results, because they completely ignored the massive fines for fraud: Reading The Times\u2019s coverage of Bank of America\u2019s quarterly loss last week, I almost felt sorry for the financial behemoth. It has mortgage troubles, you see. It has &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[970,1004,974,1129],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-186157","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-corruption","category-finance","category-hack-journalism","category-journalism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186157"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=186157"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/186157\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=186157"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=186157"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=186157"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}