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Thank goodness that some commentators, at least, are cutting through the B.S. and explaining how we got into this subprime meltdown mess.

Barney Frank’s talking points notwithstanding, mortgage lenders didn’t wake up one fine day deciding to junk long-held standards of creditworthiness in order to make ill-advised loans to unqualified borrowers. It would be closer to the truth to say they woke up to find the government twisting their arms and demanding that they do so - or else.

This is Jeff Jacoby writing in the Boston Globe, and it’s a lucid, hyperlinked piece (i.e., not just raw assertions but backed by actual FACTS) that lays out the entire history of the subprime mortgage debacle.

You can’t solve a problem unless you correctly identify the cause. Blaming Wall Street and the Republicans is nauseating for precisely this reason: it muddles American’s ability to understand why this all happened in the first place.

Let’s hope more of this comes out so that we can get our thinking straight before November.

Nobody believes it any more. From Rasmussen:

Seven out of 10 voters (69%) remain convinced that reporters try to help the candidate they want to win, and this year by a nearly five-to-one margin voters believe they are trying to help Barack Obama.

A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 50% of voters think most reporters are trying to help Obama win versus 11% who believe they are trying to help his Republican opponent John McCain. Twenty-six percent (26%) say reporters offer unbiased coverage . . .

The article goes on to break down the numbers by party.

Dems are most likely to think reporters are unbiased most of the time.

They also are least likely to think that the media treats their candidate more fairly.

How to ’splain that?

One possibility is that it’s just a coincidence.

More likely: the perception of “bias” is so subjective that people don’t even realize they’re accommodating it. Take this side by side comparison of the questions that Charlie Gibson put to Obama and Palin, which I’ve adapted from this Hillary Clinton forum:

Obama interview:
(Source: ABC News transcript.)

Did you truly, in your gut, think that a black man could win the nomination of a major party to be president of the United States?
Has it sunk in yet? Do you take joy from the win?
What did your daughters think of you winning the nomination?
Who will be your VP?
Should you choose Hillary Clinton as VP?
Will you accept public finance?
What issues is your campaign about?
Will you visit Iraq?
Will you debate McCain at a town hall?
What did you think of your competitor’s [Clinton] speech?

Palin interview:
(Source: Fox News transcript.)

Do you have enough qualifications for the job you’re seeking?
Doesn’t it take hubris to accept the VP nomination, considering how inexperienced you are?
Have you ever met a foreign head of state?
Do you believe America is fighting a holy war in Iraq like I claim you said you did?
Are you sending your son to fight as a task from God?
What are your positions on territorial integrity of Georgia?
. . . Allowing Georgia and Ukraine to be members of NATO?
. . . NATO treaty?
. . . Iranian nuclear threat?
. . . What to do if Israel attacks Iran?
. . . Al Qaeda motivations?
. . . The Bush Doctrine?
. . . Attacking terrorists harbored by Pakistan?

Now an objectively “unbiased” interviewer would put the same set of questions to both individuals. I think everyone could agree on that. If anything, the more hard-hitting questions would go to the Presidential candidate, as opposed to the VP candidate.

But suppose you believe that Obama is the best Presidential Candidate since Washington himself? In that case, to your thinking, questions about hubris or attacking Pakistan or whatever wouldn’t be warranted, because you’ve already decided that Obama is a fine guy — those issues are settled, to your mind, before they’re raised.

If a candidate is prima facie superior, what would be the point of difficult questions?

Put another way: to some peoples’ minds, Sarah deserves the tougher questions; Obama does not. Therefore, lobbing softballs at him isn’t bias — it’s just How Things Should Be Done.

Simple!

CBS News does a piece of “investigative journalism.”

The topic: whether gas stations are ripping off their customers.

This CBS News investigation started with a simple question: When you fill up, are you getting every drop of gas you pay for?

So where does this crack investigative powerhouse go next?

I know what you’re thinking.

They go out to some gas stations! Pump a gallon of gas! Discover it’s actually only 126.5 ounces! Thank you, CBS, for exposing those weaselly crooks!!!

Hah! Dream on! That’s not what they do at all!

Oh no! Instead, they inform us that states don’t inspect gas stations very often. And Congress — gasp — doesn’t do ANYTHING at ALL.

What a crock.

Our intelligensia have been so dumbed down by their socialist indoctrination that they don’t even bother with whether there’s been a crime committed.

We all know business people are crooked, after all!

So why bother with the preliminaries?

Just go straight to whether the government is “doing enough.”

Idiots.

Five years ago, my Time Warner cable bill was a little over $40/month. When I got the bill with the latest price hike, which caused total to crest above $60, my patience finally gave out.

Who do these people think they are?

Do they really imagine their gawdawful product is worth even half of that?

Do they think nobody notices we’re being charged to watch ads?

I seriously considered dropping it altogether. I really don’t watch that much television. I get most of my entertainment from the Internet, from books, and from my family and friends. Some of whom are so entertaining it’s a bit scary, ha ha ha.

But every once in awhile, I’m in the mood to catch a sitcom, or I notice an interesting movie or documentary. So I haven’t quite been able to bring myself to drop it.

Directv will at least gets the bill back down to what I find bearable. And I’ll be getting about 1/2 again as many channels, which means that when I am in the mood to watch t.v. I’ll be more likely to find something watchable.

And yeah, I know some companies are even worse — about a month ago, Instapundit blogged about his ComCast bill going up $50 in one pop.

This Businessweek piece says

You aren’t really paying more because there are so many channels. The main problem is programming costs have gone up — by 34% in the past six years, the GAO report found. Much of that is because of the high salaries commanded by sports celebrities and the actors who star in top-rated shows. Those higher costs are passed onto the cable operators, who pass them onto customers, explains Gary Arlen, a media analyst with Arlen Communications in Bethesda, Md. Says Arlen: “Someone has to pay.”

Cable operators have also spent a lot to upgrade their systems — more than $75 billion from 1996 to 2002, according to the GAO report. Those upgrades were mainly to allow them to offer high-speed Internet and digital service, and the extra fees they charge for those services will more than cover those costs over time. What makes consumer activists mad is that providers are also charging nondigital (or analog) customers more for cable as well. “The upgrade was paid for twice,” says Mark Cooper, director of research at the Consumer Federation of America.

The article also reports (from the same GOA study that “rates are about 15% lower in areas where two cable companies compete. Unfortunately such competition exists in only about 2% of markets nationwide.”

Except that — as is true with any purveyor of entertainment — there’s a lot of competition. The aforementioned books and friends, the Internet, Netflix, other new media.

Seen in that context, there’s almost something comical about these incremental rate hikes. Like a cartoon character disguised as a bush, trying to move only when you’re not looking. If they only hike the price by a couple bucks at a time, nobody will notice that cable has suddenly become a major household budget item. That we’re no longer paying for it with pocket change. We’re having to make choices. Cable . . . or a nice dinner out. Cable . . . or Internet . . . make that, two months of Internet. Cable . . . or a week’s worth of groceries.

I think they’re pricing themselves out of their own market. In fact, assuming the politicians stay out of it, I predict the cable industry will discover that it has to either start cutting prices (imagine that!) or watch its customer base melt away.

Ha.

Technorati Tags: outrageous cable bills

To the Wall Street Journal.

I suppose the new format makes it easier to schlep around, but I feel a sense of loss. The old WSJ had a kind of a grandeur about it. It’s like I went to sleep one night with a ‘55 Cadillac Coupe DeVille in my garage, woke up the next morning and somebody had swapped it out for a little Hyundai or something. An era’s over, without my permission.

(Yeah, I know, newspapers are dinosaurs, etc. etc. I’m the first one to say so. But I didn’t really view the WSJ as a newspaper, more like a daily magazine. And sometimes I like to read hardcopy, maybe because I work at a computer screen all day long.)

Okay, I’m doing my part to stop this meme from corrupting any more innocent bloggers. Read this before you believe the story about cows having accents. It’s a PR ploy. Make that, a PR cow pie. Hear that sound around the globe? It’s the sound of journalists munching. Munch munch munch.

Technorati Tags: cow accents

Blogs that cover the cultural and economic effects of the Internet on newspaper publishing are all linking a couple of articles in The Economist about the latter’s dire straits:

For most newspaper companies in the developed world, 2005 was miserable. They still earn almost all of their profits from print, which is in decline. As people look to the internet for news and young people turn away from papers, paid-for circulations are falling year after year. Papers are also losing their share of advertising spending. Classified advertising is quickly moving online. Jim Chisholm, of iMedia, a joint-venture consultancy with IFRA, a newspaper trade association, predicts that a quarter of print classified ads will be lost to digital media in the next ten years. Overall, says iMedia, newspapers claimed 36% of total global advertising in 1995 and 30% in 2005. It reckons they will lose another five percentage points by 2015.

So what are newspapers to do?

Gal Beckerman, at CJR Daily, ends a summary of the piece with this little zinger:

If the only way to make newspapers profitable is to turn “fine journalism” into junk, than maybe we should start thinking about whether or not news is too precious a commodity to be subjected to the same economic rules by which one sells widgets or hamburgers.

That would be “free market” rules, right? Bring on state-subsidized newspapers!

Meanwhile Jeff Jarvis excerpts from this companion piece in a post titled “Who Saved the Treees?” — and notes that it ends hopefully. This is about change, after all. And change is only a threat if you aren’t willing to change with it.

I was thinking last night about how Google has made a fortune organizing content for people without regard to its quality while newspapers husband their content jealously — in essence, they place a higher value on the content than on peoples’ access to it. “This is so good, you have to pay to see it.” “If you want to read this, you have to register and maintain an account with us.”

It’s a completely different mindset. No wonder the newspaper industry is in flames.

Technorati Tags: media, newspaper industry

A few days ago I blogged about Newsweek’s lame-acre retraction of a story they published 20 years ago. The story claimed unmarried women over 40 were more likely to die by a terrorist attack than find a husband. The claim was bogus; Newsweek’s attitude contemptible.

Now comes this article by Philip E. Tetlock at Project Syndicate.

Tetlock has written a book that looks at pundit predictions, reported in the media, and whether they’ve come to pass.

This guy deserves a medal for calling attention to this. A big flashy platinum medal with a huge cash prize attached:

[W]hen hordes of pundits are jostling for the limelight, many are tempted to claim that they know more than they do. Boom and doom pundits are the most reliable over-claimers.

Between 1985 and 2005, boomsters made 10-year forecasts that exaggerated the chances of big positive changes in both financial markets (e.g., a Dow Jones Industrial Average of 36,000) and world politics (e.g., tranquility in the Middle East and dynamic growth in sub-Saharan Africa). They assigned probabilities of 65% to rosy scenarios that materialized only 15% of the time.

In the same period, doomsters performed even more poorly, exaggerating the chances of negative changes in all the same places where boomsters accentuated the positive, plus several more (I still await the impending disintegration of Canada, Nigeria, India, Indonesia, South Africa, Belgium, and Sudan). They assigned probabilities of 70% to bleak scenarios that materialized only 12% of the time.

Tetlock calls for tracking pundits’ records publicly, so that media consumers have a way of judging their credibility.

I say, we should also hold the media to account. After all, if false pundits weren’t hugged and kissed and led out into the spotlight, “here’s your microphone, dear,” their silly pronouncements could do no harm . . .

Technorati Tags: media, false predictions

About what you “read in the papers,” that is. You know that Newsweek story from 1986 that said single women over 40 were more likely to be killed by terrorists than find husbands?

It was bunk.

Here, via CJR Daily, is a quick recap of the original piece.

Newsweek’s cover was premised on a single demographic study on marriage patterns in America which included these “dire statistics”: “white, college-educated women born in the mid-’50s who are still single at 30 have only a 20 percent chance of marrying. By the age of 35 the odds drop to 5 percent. Forty-year-olds are more likely to be killed by a terrorist: they have a minuscule 2.6 percent probability of tying the knot” — figures which, Newsweek noted, were creating a “profound crisis of confidence among America’s growing ranks of single women.”

Here’s Newsweek’s mealy-mouthed retraction, 20 years later.

You know what? The 1986 Newsweek article includes all the elements that ought to make one instantly suspicious about a so-called news story– and no, I’m not even talking about the “single demographic study” bit. That’s too easy.

I’m talking about the combination of a hysterical cadence of direly regressive statistics and the assertion that the aforementioned statistics are causing terrible emotional duress–i.e., that they’re already exacting a measurable toll on peoples’ day to day lives.

It’s contemporary journalism’s equivalent of frenzy-inducing demagoguery. It doesn’t have to make sense. All it has to do is tap into some primal fear–fear of being alone, in this case–and ladle on a bunch of numbers that make it look like the reader is doomed.

But it gets worse. Here’s CJR Daily again:

How did that “terrorist” line come to pass? The magazine explains that it was “first hastily written as a funny aside in an internal reporting memo” by a Newsweek correspondent, then “inserted … into the story” by an editor on the opposite coast. Although this editor and her colleagues “thought it was clear the comparison was hyperbole … Most readers missed the joke.”

Not only was this a piss poor piece of journalism–they were flip about it.

Flip. As they launched a meme that, although subsequently debunked, remains widely believed.

Moral of the story: if it reads like hype, it is hype. Ignore it, for the sake of your own mental health.

Technorati Tags: newsweek, marriage crunch

A month or so ago, a certain Englishman who has forgotten more songs than I will ever listen to in my life told me about this UK site.

Now, via Meg at Blogcabin: Pandora.

The idea of both sites is that you tell them what sort of songs you like, and they assemble a “radio station” that streams similar music. You can refine the “station” they build for you by giving feedback (e.g. by banning a song that grates on you). You can also share the station/s you’ve created with friends.

What a great way to explore music. What a perfect example of how technology can offset the homogenization that tends to result from mass market commerce models. And we didn’t even need to wait for the Singularity :-D

Technorati Tags: Pandora, Music Genome Project, Last.fm