Neil deMause: The Website

In an analysis of media coverage of the cap-and-trade climate legislation, I compare it to reporting on the health care bill, noting that in both cases journalists omitted any mention of criticism that the bills were too weak. And perfect timing too, since the climate bill just got even more like the health bill, in that Obama is backing away from trying to pass it anytime soon.

The sweeping bill to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions that moved through Congress over the last year received relatively scant media attention, taking a distant back seat to the healthcare reform bill and its attendant public uproar. And, much like the healthcare debate (Extra!, 10/09), coverage of climate-change legislation ended up obscuring the issues as much as it explained them, viewing a Democratic compromise bill through the lens of right-wing and corporate criticism, while marginalizing progressive critics who said the legislation was insufficient to the task at hand…. [read more]

After I wrote my last post, I spotted David Brooks’ Times op-ed asking why Haiti had such poor building construction. His answer: Voodoo and bad child-rearing!

I’d say more, but the letters in response really say it all.

So here we are again: Watching scenes of unimaginable devastation, of people crying out “Help us!” (or in this case, “Amwe!“) while the world watches and waits for rescuers to arrive. And again, we are told over and over that while the disaster may be natural, poverty is to blame for the scope of the disaster — in New Orleans, people couldn’t afford cars to escape the water, in Port-au-Prince people couldn’t afford reinforced concrete to stand up to a 7-magnitude quake.

What’s missing, so far at least, is outrage at this. There has been no Jack Cafferty moment, no news reporters looking at the horrors and wondering how, in our modern world, this can still happen.

I know the reason, of course. The cry during Katrina was “How can this happen in the United States?” and, of course, Haiti isn’t in the United States. It’s in the Third World, where, presumably, in the American mind this sort of stuff is acceptable — the corollary of “How can this happen here?” of course, is “This is supposed to happen there!” But it’s still odd when you think about it that compassion, at least of the “We should prevent this” type as opposed to the “We should send $20 to the Red Cross” type, stops at national borders, especially when you consider that Port-au-Prince is only slightly further from my home in Brooklyn than New Orleans is — not to mention that there are way more Haitians in my immediate neighborhood than Louisianans.

Which brings me to the other media omission: Despite all the focus on Haiti’s crushing poverty, I haven’t yet seen many reporters wondering how it got to be that way. It’s a complicated historical issue, obviously, but no one (outside of Canada, anyway) has even asked the question — not even bringing in a Haiti development expert (and lord knows there are plenty) to explain why it is that the Dominican Republic, which shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti, is relatively richer and more resilient to disasters than its neighbor to the west. The closest I’ve seen so far is a brief aside in the ABC News article linked above, citing Cuba for its “very good emergency management infrastructure,” without investigating why that might be the case.

Now, maybe it’s just too early for the media to turn its attention to this topic — maybe by the weekend, we’ll have tons of articles exploring Haitian history and North-South economic relations and racism and the differing features of Spanish and French colonialism. But somehow I’m not holding my breath.

In reading this AP story about the removal of the last remnants of a public option from the health reform bill, it occurred to me: Do journalists intentionally avoid explaining certain issues because if they did, one side would sound, you know, stupid? Take a section like this:

Many Democrats say they’d like to see a plan like Medicare to give consumers affordable choices. Republicans and some moderate Democrats fear private companies wouldn’t be able to compete. The search for a middle ground has been difficult.

That doesn’t actually explain anything, which is a bad thing in an article claiming to explain “key issues in the health care debate.” But think about how it would look if the writer had actually tried to describe what’s going on:

Many Democrats say they’d like to see the government provide health insurance, because, like Medicare, it’d be cheaper than private insurance. But Republicans and some moderate Democrats say that the only way we can have private insurance is if it stays expensive, and no one will buy expensive private insurance if there’s a better option. The first group knows this is crazy, but can’t say it out loud because then Joe Lieberman will lock himself in the Senate chamber and hold his breath until he turns purple.

Indeed, the search for a middle ground is difficult. In journalism doubly so.

So much for promises that the New York Times would soon diverge from the media’s obsession with the Nouveau Poor. The front page of today’s Times features a profile of foreclosed homeowners who are now living in homeless shelters that is a classic of the genre:

Ms. West — mother of three grown children, grandmother to six and great-grandmother to one — passed months on the couches of friends and relatives, and in the front seat of her car.

But this fall, she exhausted all options. She had once owned and overseen a group home for homeless people. Now, she succumbed to that status herself, checking in to a shelter.

“No one could have told me that in a million years: I’d wake up in a homeless shelter,” she said. “I had a house for homeless people. Now, I’m homeless.”

The message here is clear: What kind of world are we coming to? Homeless shelters are supposed to be for homeless people! Not for people without homes!

The upside of this, and no doubt how the Times and other people rationalize running these kinds of articles over and over again, is that maybe the “There but for the grace of god” element will enable other homeowners reading this to empathize with their former peers where they might not someone who lost their home for more mundane reasons than the global economic meltdown. Whether that will spill over into caring more broadly about poor people is questionable, though, especially when reporter Peter S. Goodman writes lines like:

“These families never needed help before,” said Larry Haynes, executive director of Mercy House in Santa Ana, Calif. “They haven’t a clue about where to go, and they have all sorts of humiliation issues. They don’t even know what to say, what to ask for.”

and

So, as lean times endure and paychecks disappear, homeless shelters are absorbing those who have run out of alternatives.

Unlike in normal times, when homeless shelters are occupied by people who haven’t run out of alternatives, and who certainly have no “humiliation issues.” Because, after all, they know they’re supposed to be poor.

Of all the inane chatter flying around about Barack Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize win, the award for the inanest has got to go to the Washington Post’s Chris Cillizza, who first opines that this will make up for Obama’s devastating loss of the 2016 Olympics (sadly, no mention of Leno’s ratings), then proceeds to this conclusion:

Winning the Nobel Prize will allow Obama to go to his divided Democratic caucus and make the case far more forcefully that the time is now to stay united behind him on Afghanistan.

As my spouse noted on hearing this: “Oh, I see. Winning the Nobel Peace Prize is a justification for going to war.”

UPDATE: At least one former Nobel Peace Prize winner agrees.

Reason #1 never to believe economic predictions in the media:

The number of newly laid-off workers seeking unemployment benefits fell for the third straight week, evidence that layoffs are continuing to ease in the earliest stages of an economic recovery. —AP, 9/24/09

The American economy lost 263,000 jobs in September — far more than expected — and the unemployment rate rose to 9.8 percent, the government reported on Friday, dimming prospects of any meaningful job growth by the end of the year. —New York Times, today

Reason #2, three headlines that greeted me in a stack on Google News this morning:

Manhattan Apartment Sales Bounced Back Over the Summer, but Not All the Way

Manhattan real estate sales ’stabilizing’

Manhattan Apartment Prices Drop for Second Quarter

Finally, if you want some predictions with actual research behind them, I offer Rutgers economists Jim Hughes and Joseph Seneca, who predict that we could be heading into the “Lost Employment Decade,” and that it could be 2017 before unemployment drops to pre-recession levels of 2007, and called this an “optimistic” projection: “It’s not going to be an easy slog from here.” Though of course, I read about this in a newspaper report, so it’s probably best to take it with a grain of salt.

The New York Times ran a Page One story yesterday headlined “Where Home Prices Crashed Early, Signs of a Rebound,” all about the housing market in Sacramento, which it declares to be in “the earliest stages of a recovery, a hopeful sign for an economy mired in trouble and anxiety.”

What’s the evidence of this provided in the article? To wit: A single real estate industry analyst says he’s hopeful that prices will “show evidence of stabilizing” soon — i.e., that they’ll stop falling like a rock as they have in recent months. Meanwhile, home sales are up, but only because everyone’s buying foreclosures — which only foretells that they’ll keep selling if there are more foreclosures. And while that well may happen, it’s hard to see it as a good sign for the housing market.

All of which looks less like a “rebound” than “hitting bottom and staying there,” but there’s an implicit agreement among newspapers (especially the Times) to view the world through the lens of the real-estate industry, which needless to say appreciates having front-page stories encouraging people to run out and buy homes. Though you have to wonder how long they’ll keep this up once real estate ads disappear altogether.

The news media is finally getting around to noticing poverty, but do only a certain class of needy qualify?

As the economy crumbles, issues of poverty and economic need have begun to make more frequent appearances in the news media. From October through December 2008, for example, the three nightly TV news shows ran 20 stories—about one every four or five days—addressing poverty or related issues such as homelessness or food stamps. A previous FAIR study of nightly news coverage (Extra!, 9–10/07), by comparison, found an average of one poverty story on the evening news every three weeks.

More coverage, though, does not necessarily mean better coverage. And while swelling food-stamp rolls and unemployment lines may become media staples as the economic downturn worsens, the way poverty issues are portrayed remains constrained by political biases and stereotypes.

If there’s one commonality to the recent surge in coverage of economic need, it’s that the focus is on the newly poor—-with particular attention to those who can claim a middle-class background… [read more]

Fun with Google caching!

Bronx Borough President Adolfo Carrion is “in hot water” after blurting out to Yale students that he’d already been picked for a top job in the Obama administration, as well as the target of “an anti-Adolfo e-mail campaign” to Obama’s change.gov by Bronx residents upset by his role in the Yankee Stadium controversy, according to a story by Daily News Bronx editor Bob Kappstatter. Wrote one angry Bronxite: “If he runs for a dog catcher, we will campaign against him and support the dogs.”

At least, that’s what you would have read on the Daily News website at 2:16 am, when it was posted. By this afternoon, the story, headlined “Adolfo Carrion under fire,” had disappeared from the Daily News site… [read more]