Black is Back

Bill Black speaks with Dan Froomkin - and goes all hammer and tongs about the under reported aspects of the ongoing financial mess:

The things I think are critical and badly underreported are:

1. The astonishing amount of mortgage fraud (literally, millions of cases annually) and how it hyperinflated the bubble and led to the Great Recession.

2. The fact that these mortgage frauds were overwhelmingly due to consciously fraudulent lending practices in which the CEOs of seemingly legitimate entities used accounting tricks as their “weapon of choice” to report higher profits and get bigger bonuses. (George A. Akerlof and Paul R. Romer got it right in the title to their 1993 article: Looting: The Economic Underworld of Bankruptcy for Profit.)

Like a refreshing bucket of ice water to the head. It's just a pity we're lost in a blizzard.

(H/t CJR's Ryan Chittum, naturally)

America's Finest News Source Bags Another Scoop

Behold, the Onion's latest masterpiece:

Massive Flow Of Bullshit Continues To Gush From BP Headquarters

Dangerous Game

In the early nineteen-seventies, Mark and Delia Owens, two graduate students in biology at the University of Georgia, were seized by the idea of resettling in remotest Africa. They organized an auction, sold their possessions, and used the modest proceeds to buy camping equipment and a pair of one-way air tickets to Johannesburg....

The story progresses until these two people find themselves locked in a deadly struggle against ivory poachers, poverty and corrupt government officials.

Heard this one before, right?

No you haven't.

The Hunted is a long, slow-boil story that starts with youth and idealism - and ends with a dead body dumped in a lagoon.

(H/t Marc Ambinder)

Cancel my subscription

I'm on the phone, pulling the plug on my newspaper subscription when I run across Felix Salmon's post America's Doomed Small Newspapers.

He's talking about Bill Wyman's article Five Key Reasons Why Newspapers Are Failing

The problem of the daily press in the U.S. is exclusively this: the collapse of its business model. That model used to be, plainly put, making money—a lot of money, oceans of money—delivering advertising on newsprint into peoples’ homes. Subscribers didn’t pay for news. Advertisers did.

-and it goes without saying that advertisers are pulling back.

And so am I. I almost never read my local paper. It piles up where I unthinkingly fling it: in the front hallway, the kitchen table, in the footwell of the car.

I've taken armloads of still-bagged newspapers and deposited them in the recycle bin in broad daylight - sure that somewhere the (now-resurgent) driveway fairy is looking at me with scorn.

Don't get me wrong - I love newspapers. Love them.

If you sprang a day off on me - no cash, just time - and turned me loose, odds are I'd end up at my favorite breakfast place with a copy of the NYT and spend as long as I dared there paging through it at length.

The time to savor reading the news - aaah the luxury.

But I don't have that time. And besides, newsprint has three unpardonable sins from my standpoint:

1. It costs money.
2. It's hard to navigate (pull out the advert/puff pieces...continued on page C7...etc)
3. I have to clean it up

Internet content obviously has none of these issues (so far) - so I'm a fool to have subscribed for so long.

Wyman's article starkly illustrates the dire straits newspapers find themselves in. It does not inspire hope.

The value the [newspaper] companies added to the print ads was their de facto hegemony over home delivery...that hegemony doesn’t exist online. And the value of that hegemony is gone forever.

He offers local newspapers a few bits of advice, but it's less than kind:

Serve the community. Don't publish crap. Tell folks stuff they might not want to hear. Grow a pair.

It makes you wonder what will come next.

...and more to the point - how it will be funded.

Pulitzer snub for the WSJ

(Via Megan Garber of CJR)

Notably, no [Pulitzer] winners at the Wall Street Journal. In the year when the financial crisis was THE big story.

That's gotta sting.

Deaf to eavesdropping

CJR's Laura Rozen writes Hung Out to Dry, an excellent recap of how wiretapping and black sites have endured public exposure.

I particularly like this bit (emphasis mine):

“I have found that the stories which most anger and haunt journalists are not necessarily the ones with the most violence,” says Bruce Shapiro, the executive director of the Dart Center for Journalism & Trauma. “They are the stories in which we felt our intervention to have accomplished nothing. What’s really striking with the Risen story [exposing NSA wiretapping] is precisely that sense of powerlessness: they committed this great act of journalism, and broke a story of a violation of federal law that raises fundamental questions about abuses of power in our society. And then the great institutions of society don’t respond, but instead turn around and say, ‘F-ck you.’ That is a huge invalidation of all the work, and further betrayal of our sense as journalists of what’s right.”

Read the whole thing.

Letter from a dead man

(via CJR)

There are few monuments to fallen journalists, but the last editorial of slain Sri Lankan reporter Lasantha Wickramatunga should be graven in stone and placed where the world can see it.

In the course of the past few years, the independent media have increasingly come under attack. Electronic and print-media institutions have been burnt, bombed, sealed and coerced. Countless journalists have been harassed, threatened and killed. It has been my honour to belong to all those categories and now especially the last.

[snip]

I - and my family - have now paid the price that I have long known I will one day have to pay. I am - and have always been - ready for that. I have done nothing to prevent this outcome: no security, no precautions. I want my murderer to know that I am not a coward like he is, hiding behind human shields while condemning thousands of innocents to death.

Risking your life for your beliefs is one thing - to willfully choose death over betraying them is another thing entirely.