Did the muses of journalism go on vacation this week? Was the Arianna Huffington/Tina Brown onslaught just too much for anyone who didn’t sleep through Reporting 101? The battle for this week’s Most Over-Hyped News Story Prize will be a close one. Below, your contenders:
1. In the provocatively titled “Spy games come to New York for UN General Assembly,” the AP suggests that “American diplomats were not caught flat-footed” by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s anti-U.S. rant to the General Assembly because the United Nations has become “a hotbed of spying and clandestine operations.” Likening the opening of the General Assembly to the Super Bowl of spy games, the AP implies that the American delegation knew in advance that Ahmadinejad would accuse the U.S. of staging the 9/11 attacks. While I have no doubts that the CIA could have (and probably did) wiretap Ahmadinejad’s hotel room, we’re talking about an Iranian nutjob who has been repeating his 9/11 conspiracy theory for several years. He sees Zionist plots behind every potted plant and infamously called for Israel to be “wiped off the map.” The guy has a history of making incendiary speeches at the UN, leading the Times to report on Sept. 22 that “Mr. Ahmadinejad’s remarks provoked what has become a ritual large-scale walkout of delegations, led by the United States.” Spy games? Possibly. But American officials would have to be sleeping on the job — catatonic, really — to not have a standard Crazy Speech rebuttal cued up on their Blackberries.
2. The Washington Post broke the story, if you can call it that, about a racial slur painted on a rock at Rick Perry’s ranch. The property was apparently known, in a more bigoted era, as “Niggerhead.” The controversy hinged on whether the Perry family had acted quickly enough to paint over the offensive word. I am no fan of Rick Perry, but seriously. This is a governor who has been accused of rewarding campaign donors with state “innovation grants,” who shoots coyotes while out for a jog, and who has hinted Texas might secede from the union. Could the Post not come up with anything more salacious than a graffitied boulder?
3. Bloomberg Market’s attempt at an expose of Koch Industries garnered a lot of pre-publication scuttlebutt when a company PR flack issued a rebuttal before even seeing the piece. Unfortunately, the most interesting thing about “Koch Industries Flout Law Getting Richer With Secret Iran Sales” was the convoluted headline, which was ungrammatical even by Bloomberg’s standards. Despite the labor of fourteen reporters (indeed, the article reads as if written by committee), the story reveals nothing but run-of-the-mill environmental violations and mostly resolved legal complaints. It’s not a record to be proud of, but after the BP oil spill and robo-signed foreclosure notices, the bar has been raised for outrage at corporate malfeasance. And the “secret” sales to Iran may have been morally suspect, but illegal? Not at the time. Reaction to the story has been swift and mostly negative; at The Atlantic, Daniel Indiviglio lambastes the Bloomberg reporters for bias, then makes a blatantly biased statement himself: ” I would challenge those same reporters to find many business executives who welcome excessive regulation, unless it manages to give them an advantage over their smaller competitors, as so much regulation does.” Did I mention Indiviglio is a former investment banker?
While the Bloomberg story unsuccessfully (and inappropriately) attempted to link the Koch brothers’ political leanings to their business practices, a short piece in The Nation expertly showcased the hollowness of their libertarian philosophy. The magazine unearthed a 1973 letter from Charles Koch, who has funded “the right-wing attempt to dismantle Social Security and Medicare,” to Friedrich Hayek in which the billionaire urges the free-market economist (and current Tea Party hero) to take advantage of — wait for it — Social Security and Medicare. The Nation writes that the correspondence between “these two major free-market apostles . . . reveal[s] a shocking degree of cynicism and an unimaginable betrayal of the ideas they sold to the American public and the rest of the world.”
4. The Washington Post gets another demerit for an article on Solyndra, the solar-panel manufacturer that defaulted on a $528 million government-backed loan. The Department of Energy’s loan program has since become Exhibit A in the GOP’s attack on “wasteful” government spending. That message is only reinforced by the Post’s sloppy reporting on the so-called scandal. Joe Stephens and Carol D. Leonnig write that DOE was “poised last summer to give Solyndra a second major taxpayer loan of $469 million.” Well, not quite. Taxpayer dollars were not actually loaned to Solyndra; rather, private loans to the company were guaranteed by taxpayer dollars. Essentially, if Solyndra couldn’t pay back its loans, the feds promised to step in to make investors whole. The distinction may seem subtle, given that the government is now on the hook for a half-billion dollars, but it’s an important one. The Post leaves readers with the impression that the money is gone and cannot be recovered, but much of the loan will probably be repaid with the proceeds from the bankruptcy liquidation of Solyndra’s assets — its plant, patents, and other properties. While Stephens and Leonnig use the correct terminology in several cases, referring to a “second loan guarantee” and a “taxpayer-backed loan,” they also describe “the need for more federal money” and neglect to mention that some or all of the money may be repaid. The story’s headline, which announces that “Dept. of Energy was poised to approve $469 million for firm,” paints a picture of Solyndra receiving tax dollars directly from the Treasury. The government will probably lose money on the Solyndra loans, but certainly not the entire half-billion dollars. The loans were, by a design, a risk — after all, if no risk were involved, there would have been no need for a federal guarantee. To give readers the impression that the Solyndra guarantee should have been a completely safe investment distorts the situation and plays into a partisan, anti-government narrative.
5. A (dis)honorable mention goes to last month’s McClatchy story on the impact of regulation on small businesses. Kevin G. Hall’s article attempts to dispel the myth that “excessive regulation and fear of higher taxes” puts a damper on job creation by interviewing “a random sample of small business owners across the nation.” Nearly every person interviewed denies that businesses are hurt by environmental and safety laws. “None of the business owners complained about regulation in their particular industries, and most seemed to welcome it,” Hall writes, raising the question of whether he put together his “random sample” from The Nation’s mailing list. Business owners express appreciation for stimulus money and provide Hall with quotations that could have come from President Obama’s press secretary. “I think the rich have to be taxed, sorry,” one owner says, while another proclaims that regulation is “absolutely, positively not” hurting his bottom line. In an echo of the president’s frequent exhortation for the wealthy to “pay their fair share,” one man reports that “I want to pay my fair share, and I do.” I’m as skeptical as the next left-winger of the Republican claim that regulation kills jobs, but I’m equally as skeptical of a newspaper article in which reality fits so perfectly into the reporter’s story line. Hall never says how he picked his “random sample” of business owners, but in a country split down the middle between Republicans and Democrats, it’s hard to believe that he did not encounter a single small-government conservative. Hall calls the responses to his questioning “surprising,” but what is really surprising is that no one at McClatchy raised an eyebrow when 100% of the interviewees supported its reporter’s thesis. If I don’t believe the GOP when it claims to speak for all “job creators,” then I’m also not about to believe that all businesspeople are bleeding-heart Democrats.
. . . So Well Read. . . 