The other night at dinner, our seminar speaker started to explain to us about how the Community Reinvestment Act caused the subprime crisis. There was a new twist in the story, he claimed there was a flawed study (which he surely made up or at least misrepresented) that had showed that whether or not people made their mortgage payments, and, as a result, the courts/federal government (he didn’t explain the mechanism) forced banks to lend to anyone who wanted it. He had all of this on very good authority from his father-in-law at Morgan Stanley. May FSM strike me dead if I am not relating his story accurately. I thought of that when I saw this from Atrios:
5 years from now it will probably be a “fact” that ACORN and the Community Reinvestment Act caused the housing bubble.
And I thought of that again when I saw (on Fallows) that the Washington Post still hasn’t amended its Nobel for Neda piece to note that Nobel prizes are not awarded posthumously. And again when I saw this bizarre explanation of it all from Howie Kurtz:
Fairfax County, Va.: Hi Howard, This Sunday, I read the editorials in The Post and The New York Times about the surprise Peace Prize. I liked the NYT editorial (which was pro), but like most of us, including Obama, I could certainly have handled an editorial that was anti this choice.
When I read The Washington Post editorial, I felt so sad for what this paper has become. Their whole idea was that the prize should have gone to Neda, the woman who was murdered by the Iranian police. Nobel Peace Prizes can’t be given posthumously. It’s a basic, easy factcheck. There are other fact problems, too (the protests hadn’t happened by the nomination date, Neda may not have been a protester).
So the idea that the committee made a careless or inappropriate choice is refuted by a slapdash editorial “choice” that nobody bothered to check? It just screamed out to me “we laid off almost all the copy editors.” I feel so sad for The Post I grew up with. It’s great to have an opinion. It’s bad to look dumb.
washingtonpost.com: Post Editorial: Our Laureate: Neda of Iran (Post, Oct. 10) andTimes Editorial: The Peace Prize (The New York Times, Oct. 9)
Howard Kurtz: I take your point about no posthumous awards, though by that standard Martin Luther King couldn’t have won after being assassinated (yes, I know he won the prize earlier). My reading of the piece was that Neda was being used more as a symbol (though the rule should have been mentioned). But it’s an editorial. It is by definition opinion. Of course some readers are going to disagree.
It’s not “by that reasoning”, it’s a rule the Nobel Prize committee has! How hard is it to understand that?
Were things always like this? Did newspapers always fill their editorial pages with factual inaccuracies they refused to correct? Were criticisms of the inaccuracies always defended with non sequiturs about other events? Was it always common for ostensibly reasonable, intelligent people to go around repeating stories that are not only not true but couldn’t possibly be true?
Update. I see that Mediactive wrote about Kurtz’s strange answer as well. There are some good points there.
Hunter Gathers
Shorter Howard Kurtz : We Don’t Care
jibeaux
Correct.
What a stupid answer. You can make the argument that Neda, WERE THE AWARD GIVEN POSTHUMOUSLY, would have made a good recipient because of x,y,and z and she represents what the prize should be given for. Then you would have a factually correct editorial opinion piece. How hard is that?
Maude
Do you remember the Regan Era? That’s when stupid became good, ignorance became admired and facts became bad.
BerkeleyMom
Neda seems to be becoming the latest Jessica Lynch. At least Jessica Lynch was still alive to set the record straight eventually.
Howard Kurtz is just not even trying anymore–by any standard.
arguingwithsignposts
Why let the facts get in the way of a good opinion piece? What a douche. It’s postmodern journalism at its finest.
Tom Parmenter
If we had some ham we could have some ham and eggs if we had some eggs.
If Martin Luther King Jr. hadn’t received the Nobel Peace Prize before he was assassinated, he wouldn’t have been eligible after he was assassinated. Convincing!
The Grand Panjandrum
Doug I heard a great piece on NPR’s On The Media and it addressed the issue of fact checking at newspapers. The prognosis is grim, at best.
That WaPo ombudsman column is here. Read it and weep.
SpotWeld
I will say this right now.
There is no mechanism by which the government can force a bank to give someone a loan Especially a bad loan.
The bank has to simply state it’s legal criteria for not wanting to give the loan.. and that’s it.
Banks invented the NINA loan, not the CRA.
Jim C
Shorter Howie: Now, if my head were veal – which I know that it’s not – if my head were veal, how much would it be worth?
He needs an editor for his online chats. That is some Grade A gobbledygook.
“By that standard” … great googly moogly.
Were there any justice, or brains, or caring, Howie would be laughed out of DC for that line of baloney.
The Republic of Stupidity
This brings to mind a comment I read a few years back from some Russian. To paraphrase:
“There are no stupid Russian politicians. The stupid ones are all dead. You Americans have been on top so long, you’ve all gotten fat and lazy…”
No doubt said w/ glint in eye as he fingered the shiv in his pocket.
SpotWeld
The guy who sits next to me at work has railed with this story of how Janet Reno somehow stormed congress and demanded that the CRA pass and this forced the banks to over extend themselves and ignore thier own loan criteria…
It’s a fairy tale and I’m fairly certain he was just repeating something he heard on the radio.
Deborah
By that standard, Twain can’t win for literature now that he’s dead! By that standard, Marie and Irene Curie couldn’t win Nobel prizes, and if they hadn’t won them it would be like they never won them except posthumously which they apparently can’t, so, bummer.
DougJ
The prognosis is grim, at best.
The editorial staff has been unable to learn how to use google?
Zifnab
Keep in mind that if you go back forty or fifty years, there were a lot more newspapers, and they were owned by a lot more organizations. You didn’t have Newscorp and Disney with a 40% stake in the entire industry.
Did that make the news more accurate? I don’t know. But it must have dispersed the amount of lazy and stupid enough that people didn’t notice as much.
Midnight Marauder
THEN WHY THE FUCK ARE YOU EVEN BRINGING THE “POINT” UP, HOWARD?!
Joshua
Man, whatever happened to being held accountable for the shit that comes out of your mouth? WaPo is paying morons that don’t know a basic fact about the subject they are writing on, but hey, it’s just their opinion that a dead person should’ve won the Nobel. What’s the big deal? Bill Kristol thinks we should drop a nuke on Tehran, that’s just his opinion! My opinion is we shouldn’t drop a nuke on Tehran, so why not just split the difference?
It’s like you can’t call someone out on their bullshit just because it’s their opinion and they have theirs and you have yours so it’s all good. Just “agree to disagree” right?
Stooleo
Maybe the Nobel committee is now giving these out sooner rather than later, cause they kinda blew it by not awarding one to Gandhi.
Warren Terra
Whiskey Tango Foxtrot?
MLK couldn’t have won that second, posthumous prize? Does Kurtz imagine he DID win a second one? How was the acceptance speech? Does Kurtz know of other secret prizes? Jesus?
LoveMonkey
This is pretty naive. This ship sailed a long time ago. The subtlety of facts has been an obsolete concept in mainstream info delivery for years.
We entered the era of explicit ends-justify-means politics, government, and information, in about 1964, when Goldwater announced that it was okay, or if you prefer, back in the late 1940’s when the Dulles Brothers and their cronies decided that Americans would get only the information they need, and that people like the Dulles Brothers would decide what they needed, and that was that. There was a minor uprising in the 50’s around the Edward R. Murrow crowd, but that little flurry was the last stand of honest journalism. Murrow died shortly after and with him died real integrity in the news media.
We’ve known this for years, why are we still acting like we are just discovering it every month or so now?
Mark S.
By that standard, JFK couldn’t have been president after he was assassinated (yes, I know he was president when he was assassinated).
Chad N Freude
@Maude:
Why does this make me think of some book by some English guy?
Midnight Marauder
@Joshua:
“Well, Joshua, looks like we’re gonna have to leave it there…”
Napoleon
DougJ,
Did someone set your seminar speaker straight?
Midnight Marauder
@Mark S.:
Also, it looks like Howie may have spawned a new entry for the Lexicon.
Sirkowski
Opinions are cheaper than facts.
Montysano (All Hail Marx & Lennon)
@SpotWeld:
You just described my insufferable asshat of a brother-in-law. Because he works for a double-secret gummint contractor here in Rocket City, USA, he claims access to secret information which proves beyond a doubt that brown people crashed the economy. He and I stunk up a recent family dinner “discussing” that one.
matoko_chan
Well.the cognitive dissonance is quite stunning.
How can Obama not have accomplished enough by the nomination date (february 11, 2009) yet Miss Agha Sultan was an ordinary university student who had accomplished NOTHING on the same date?
The committee would have had to have a time machine to go back and nominate her after her death.
Moran-alert.
El Cid
This is very clear: our economy collapsed because Jimmy Carter made banks let black people steal $700 billion worth of houses. This is true because I heard it.
Also, there were too many regulations. I heard this too.
Very Reverend Crimson Fire of Compassion
By that standard, Jesus wouldn’t have been eligible for three whole days (yes, I know there was no Nobel prize then, but he was Jesus, so he could time travel)!
matoko_chan
Conservatives are stupid.
That is what a half century of inverse fitness selection for people too stupid to understand ToE and/or basic economics does.
Inverse social darwinism…..selection for stupid.
JMC in the ATL
Clearly, one is entitled to one’s own opinion, but not to one’s own facts. Unless one works for a major metropolitan newspaper. Also.
Jack Roy
Someone was saying a while back that the Washington Post has really always been a neo-con paper, that the Woodward-Bernstein era was just a brief punctuation mark that gives the misleading impression that it used to be a better paper and only in recent years has gotten worse. According to this source (whom damn but I can’t remember), it’s always been this way, but it’s just hard to remember that on account of that whole Nixon shebang.
Anyway, central point. I’ve taken to imagining that the salaried defenders of the traditional media are auditioning for Gossip Girl, or Mean Girls, or whatever it is the kids are into these days. It often results in their arguments (such as they are) making a lot more sense. For instance, a week or so ago Time published a piece that started with the promising observation that the White House seems to have concluded that the Washington media circuit is incapable of doing its job. In the space of about six paragraphs, it evolved to the conclusion that the White House was simply being petty, that staffers had stopped seeing the press in any light other than adversarial, etc. Now, the omissions in logic are stark, if one assumes it was written by an adult who is aware he’s writing something that will appear in a magazine and actually be read by people with brains. Shouldn’t one evaluate the possibility that the media really were doing its job terribly, ideally to refute it, before one searches for an alternative psychological explanation for staffers’ behavior? But that middle step never gets taken. Again, that’s confusing, if you read the piece and imagine it being read aloud by a grownup. However, if you read it and imagine it as the Beltway equivalent of “Well, Kristin said that Brittany said that Kirstin said that Britney said she thought Maureen’s last piece was under-thought and irresponsible, but that’s just because everyone knows that her parents are getting divorced and she’s the last girl in school who doesn’t have to wear a bra yet and anyway she’s always been jealous of Maureen’s new Trapper Keeper,” then a lot of that confusion just evaporates.
Kurtz, I think, provides further anecdotal evidence for both theories. One, he’s really always been this bad. (I remember writing papers on his coverage for a media and politics class during the 2000 election, and my thesis was that the bias toward familiar media narratives—McCain wins N.H., is “strong, confident,” then loses S.C., is “mean, desperate” and so forth—was so strong that even a media critic (hence presumably self-aware) like Kurtz, in his campaign coverage, succumbed to it. But after watching his output for the decade that followed, it seems to me that I drew a false positive from that example, that he’s really just awful.) The second is that people who wear the hat Kurtz is wearing—that of the traditional media representative answering criticism of the traditional media—are constitutionally incapable of conceding the central point of that criticism, unless it comes in the “liberal media bias” variant. So when they hear that argument, it just makes no sense to them. It’s like those stories of George Lucas not realizing that everyone hated Episode I, that he just couldn’t wrap his mind around an audience who didn’t love Jar-Jar. So they assume it’s just petty jealousy or whatever lunacy makes someone think George Bush isn’t a likable, ordinary fella.
Cruel Jest
For a while now, I’ve wanted to write a series skewering this kind of thinking, but I’m not smart enough to pretend to be this stupid. All they do is hit themselves with hammers in an effort to make the headache go away. I can’t believe these people run the political discourse.
aimai
I particularly love the reliance on this piece of frozen chin stroking and debate flotsam and jetsam:
because “I take your point” is followed by something so incoherent that an infinite number of monkeys never could have produced it, even on the way to Shakespeare:
“by the same token an event that never took place (the Posthumous award to MLK) and which didn’t need to take place (since he, in fact, received it before he was assassinated) and which never could have taken place (since it is forbidden by the rules) would have been prevented from taking place…by the application of either time, or rules, or reality to my hypothetical.
Yes, that is a shame, Howard. But never mind, the forms have been observed, you’ve “taken the point!”
aimai
Warren Terra
I agree with Midnight Marauder – this episode deserves consideration for the Lexicon (perhaps as part of a Howie Kurtz entry, as there isn’t one now).
“We’re going to have to leave it there”, also.
DougJ
Did someone set your seminar speaker straight?
No, I laughed and said “imagine a guy at Morgan Stanley making something up that made Morgan Stanley look blameless”.
geg6
@aimai:
That was brilliant. Truly.
Steeplejack
Howard Kurtz: I take your point about no posthumous awards, though by that standard Martin Luther King couldn’t have won after being assassinated (yes, I know he won the prize earlier).
That is so far beyond non sequitur there should be a different term for it.
I cut these guys some slack sometimes because real-time blogging/texting is different from “composed” writing, but this boggles the mind.
Tom Parmenter
It never became famous, but right after the election Lou Dobbs said, “After all, Obama didn’t win a majority of the voters, he only won a majority of those voting.”
arguingwithsignposts
@Steeplejack:
except, SJ, these people have an online editor actually culling through the messages and helping out with the online discussions (at least that’s the way it was two years ago). I wonder what that editor thought about Kurtz’ response?
Montysano (All Hail Marx & Lennon)
@Warren Terra:
You just beat me to it. That may have been one of the most brilliant Daily Show pieces ever.
kommrade reproductive vigor
I bet that seminar speaker ate a lot of pie.
Then why subject opinion pieces to any sort of editorial process? If facts are a matter of opinion, surely spelling, grammar and punctuation should be left to the writer as well. And what about formatting? How dare
the PostKaplan alter the font and spacing the writer uses!?Really, WTF? Did Deborah Howeller threaten to stab him if he made her look dumb by comparison?
And by using Dr. King as an example Kurtz practically admits that he likes to bone goats.
Montysano (All Hail Marx & Lennon)
@Tom Parmenter:
That’s some world-class goat-fucking right there.
Midnight Marauder
@Tom Parmenter:
I know it’s Loud Obbs and all, but no. I
can’tbelieve that he would say something that nonsensical.@Steeplejack:
Looks like the only discussion left to have is whether these kinds mind-reeling terms get labeled a “Dobbs” or a “Kurtz”.
Warren Terra
Just to cross memes:
“Assassinated Martin Luther King Jr, you’re great and I’mma let you finish, but Mohandas Gandhi is the best assassinated hypothetical Peace Prize winner of all time! Of all time!”
Steeplejack
@arguingwithsignposts:
I wonder what that editor thought about Kurtz’s response?
As I know from bitter experience, sometimes if the boss wants to make an ass of himself you just have to stand back and let him do it.
Back in the ’80s I worked at a microcomputer software company that got acquired and then divested by a mainframe software company. When we got cast off we inherited as CEO a veep from the mainframe company who wanted to make his entrepreneurial mark. I used to prep him for trade press interviews and accompany him. I could not get him to stop pronouncing the “dos” in MS-DOS to rhyme with the Spanish word for 2. You can imagine the awesome cred he racked up when he talked to industry editors about our position and products vis-à-vis MS-DOSE.
twiffer
But it’s an editorial. It is by definition opinion. Of course some readers are going to disagree.
yeah, i disagree because it’s factually incorrect. when did opinions become a religion? does this mean i can just say whatever the fuck i want, so long as i believe it to be true? faith makes facts?
can i get in on this racket somehow?
JGabriel
Howard Kurtz:
Yes, and by that reasoning Ghandi didn’t win the prize. What’s your fucking point, Howie?
.
asiangrrlMN
@Steeplejack: OK, that just cracked me up, but what the hell are you doing posting so early in the day?
Shorter Kurtz: Yeah, whatevah.
Captain Goto
@ Jack Roy: This.
Also–to the commentariat here, I just want to say “thank you”–back in the day when I wasn’t holding down a real job, I loved to pitch in with my own feeble contributions, usually at Roy Edroso’s or (before the traffic there became insane) Duncan Black’s joint.
Nowadays I just have time for the occasional hit-and-run, but I really really love the comments here, not to mention John/Doug/Tim/Annie’s stuff. Onward!!
Steeplejack
@asiangrrlMN:
Finishing up a leisurely morning and getting ready to get ready to go to the part-time gig (health insurance, yay, whatever).
Working late again, so I probably won’t be back until 11:30 at the earliest.
For some reason my brain has a harder time going into “make a comment” mode in the daytime.
Gus
@Midnight Marauder:
Yeah, I was wondering if there’s one for “facts” that have become facts only by constant repetition, e.g. “Ronald Reagan won the Cold War.”
Stefan
No, I laughed and said “imagine a guy at Morgan Stanley making something up that made Morgan Stanley look blameless”.
You should have just yelled out “you lie!”
Midnight Marauder
@Gus:
I think the closest thing we have to that is the idea of “truthiness,” but it doesn’t fully capture what you’re talking about.
That said, the phrase “Kurtzism” has a nice ring to it…
asiangrrlMN
@Steeplejack: Good luck at the job, and hope to see ya later in the night.
@Stefan:
Ha! Love it!
Waynski
The3 Post had to speculate on a Neda Nobel win. It we be irresponsible not to.
slippy
@Steeplejack: There was a scientist who one time opined of some seriously whacked-out research, “This is so bad it isn’t even wrong.”
I’d say this falls into that category.
Martin
Did nobody catch this statement by the chair of the committee:
Emphasis mine. That’s a bit of a chilling (and realistic) statement, even if that’s not how he intended it. But I think it can be argued that the committee was thinking exactly that – let’s not wait until we’re faced with a posthumous situation.
mcd410x
The most likely answer is that the editorial writer knew the rule, knew the audience knew the rule and was using a bit of creative license. Better writing might have more properly conveyed this.
That said — Howard Kurtz is a moron.
chuck
@slippy:
I’ve heard the same sentiment expressed by an acquaintance of mine as “I can’t even dignify that kind of babble with enough response to call it true or false.”
And about 10 years earlier as “whoah dude, that’s just beyond wrong!”
Who says kids don’t get postmodernism.
Steeplejack
@asiangrrlMN:
Later. I’m out.
Steeplejack
@slippy:
Nice one. I’ll have to remember that.
Sly
Just like the woman I knew who “worked” (read: administrative assistant for a minor procurement officer) for DoD who claimed that chemical weapons were, in fact, found in Iraq, it’s just that the weapons were French (!!) in origin and the Bush Administration didn’t want to cause an international incident over it, and that a local (Persian) bartender in the area was part of an Al Qaeda sleeper cell that the NSA was keeping a close eye on.
As for Kurtz: If, as a teenager, I had known that I could make a very comfortable living being an obtuse turd, I would have studied a lot less and done FAR more drugs. He’s getting paid for that garbage.
Citizen_X
Don’t you people get it? The facts that MLK already won a Nobel, and did not get nominated again, and couldn’t have been because he was already dead, are all central to Kurtz’s point!
Waynski
Apologies for the sloppy post earlier.
Gunner
Has Kurtz ever answered one of these questions that is critical of something he or one of his fellow villagers wrote with a “You know, you’re right. What I/he/she wrote is wrong. Thanks for pointing that out.”?
p.a.
for a debunking of the ‘CRA caused the crash’ meme see Barry Ritholtz. In short, only federally chartered banks were covered by CRS, only one of them went under (as of about 3/09), and CRA loans were better performers than non-CRA loans at, for example, Countrywide. Also, Fannie and Freddie went so bad so quickly because they actually held off getting into subprime until way late in the bubble cycle (say 2005) and did so mainly at the instigation of their shareholders, not the Feds, or ACORN, or Barney Frank or anyone other of Greater Wingnuttia’s threats du jour. (This is not intended to deny some DemPols contribution to the problem…)
joe from Lowell
Perhaps if I type this off-topic comment, it will lift the blinding rage that has overcome me, and I will be able to drive my daughter to gymnastics.
The Community Redevelopment Act didn’t cause the financial crisis. Not even a little, tiny bit. The CRA made mortgage lending safer, by crowding some number of irresponsible, “innovative mortgage products” out of the market in CRA-covered neighbohroods, and making boring old traditional mortgages by plain-jane, risk-averse banks more available.
This has been confirmed by numerous studies, including a great one by the San Francisco Fed. CRA-covered institutions have much lower default rates on mortgages in CRA-covered areas than the non-banks that are not subject to the act. They also are a lot less likely to grant risky or unaffordable mortgages. This is partly because deposit banks are a lot more responsible than mortgage companies, and partly because the CRA has strict affordability-confirmation standards that the rest of the mortgage market doesn’t have to adhere to.
You know who wouldn’t know the first thing about how the CRA
joe from Lowell
I’ll tell you who: someone at Morgan Stanley, which isn’t a federally-insured deposit institution, and therefore, doesn’t have any connection to the CRA.
Trakker
Probably. I’m 64, and I think the Internet and blogs have finally made it possible to quickly highlight – and scorn – ignorance in the press (and our politicians) on a medium where anyone with a computer can see it.
With powerful search engines, and video sites like YouTube, it’s becoming easier to fact check politicians and journalists and hold them responsible for their words, and there are hundreds, thousands even, of smart bloggers doing research and linking to gaffes and stupidity.
Of course, all this scrutiny gives the impression that today’s press and politicians are sleazier and stupider than their predecessors. This old geezer finds that hard to believe.
Little Macayla's Friend
@DougJ:
Besides the facts on CRA low historic default rates and total loan amounts being too small for the size of the bubble(s) even theoretically, anyone fact checking from scratch could challenge the speakers premise, so it was just ear candy for idealogues.
http://www.fdic.gov/news/news/speeches/archives/2008/chairman/spdec1708.html
This one link has many cited studies in it:
http://www.frbsf.org/publications/community/cra/cra_outstanding_needs_improve.pdf
Blaming govt. help for the poor, whatever the complexities of recent predatory lending (court cases building), instead of govt. complicity with the gamblers, isn’t what the investigative commissions are going to come out with next year.
JGabriel
@slippy:
Wolfgang Pauli.
.
scarshapedstar
By your reasoning, the sky is blue, but symbolically it’s green, and people might disagree with that but that’s their opinion.
Paycheck, please!
Little Macayla's Friend
and yes, I wish I hadn’t used the ‘idealogue’ spelling variant.
Nylund
I tutor undergrads in economics for extra cash. One of my students is taking a money and banking course and they spent some time discussing the current financial crisis in class. As I tried to help her to understand her professor’s lecture, she asked me, “why are we learning all this when everyone knows that the crisis was caused by the government forcing banks to lend to poor people?”
She also told me that she hated this class and that her last economics course was much better because all they did was talk about how great Atlas Shrugs is.
So much for liberal bias in higher education!
Anne Laurie
@Midnight Marauder:
The Lexicon also includes Rebunking and Zombie Lies. I think it’s hard for those of us in the Reality-Based Community to settle on a single catchphrase for this variety of conservatard dishonesty, because there’s just so much of it and it’s so blatantly dishonest.
gravie
I can always tell a Howard Kurtz column without even reading the byline. Always fact-free. Always right-wing. Always pretending to be objective, and failing miserably.