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Articles by Ryan Chittum | Email the Author

 

1. The Audit

   WSJ Gives TARP Panel the Play It Deserves

   April 13, 2009 08:57 AM

   Good for The Wall Street Journal for giving a nice run to an exclusive that the TARP oversight panel is investigating banks for gouging customers despite getting billions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts. I criticized the Journal and... Continue reading

2. The Audit

   Scrappy Mortgage Blogger Fights Bad Court Ruling

   April 10, 2009 12:08 PM

   A reader points us to this Citizen Media Law Project report on an unlikely new front in the battle for press freedom and an unlikely freedom fighter. A court in New Hampshire's Rockingham County recently ordered the website... Continue reading

3. The Audit

   The Banking Industry’s Other Bad Loans

   April 10, 2009 08:59 AM

   Felix Salmon has an interesting chart showing what he aptly calls the "Usury Datapoint of the Day." The chart shows the ratios of how much banks charge customers for overdrafts to how much the customers actually over-borrowed. It's even... Continue reading

4. The Audit

   Business-Press Beat-Sweetening

   April 9, 2009 12:11 PM

   I wrote about beat-sweeteners in my previous post and said I'd look at it in the business press next. It's certainly not hard to find examples. You can pretty much pick up any copy of Fortune, for example,... Continue reading

5. The Audit

   Slate’s Beat-Sweetener Reader

   April 9, 2009 11:54 AM

   Timothy Noah has a fun column over at Slate on the journalism practice of "beat-sweeteners," stories written about key sources to get in their good graces so they'll give up the goods in the future. The topic, normally a... Continue reading

6. The Audit

   The Press Buries the TARP Overseer’s Report

   April 9, 2009 09:04 AM

   The press has given short shrift to an important report by the Congressional Oversight Panel on the government's bailout efforts. I can't quite figure out why. It's got the requisite elements for a well-played story: news, credibility, conflict,... Continue reading

7. The Audit

   ProPublica Wants YOU to Dig into Obama Records

   April 8, 2009 05:13 PM

   ProPublica, the nonprofit investigative group, has rounded up a mother lode of Obama administration financial disclosures. They're asking readers to help them comb through the data and pull out the interesting bits (ie, the dirt). President Obama's administration came... Continue reading

8. The Audit

   NYT on Wall Street Versus Small-Town America

   April 8, 2009 04:52 PM

   The New York Times fronts a story that illustrates well the asymmetry of information between the financial industry and those it hawks its wares to. In this case, it's Morgan Keegan selling muni-bond derivatives to Lewisburg, Tennessee, pop.... Continue reading

9. The Audit

   WSJ With a Big Story on Grid Spies

   April 8, 2009 12:50 PM

   The Wall Street Journal gets a major scoop on its page one this morning, reporting that China and Russia have penetrated the U.S. electrical grid, seeding it with malware that could be used to try to shut the system... Continue reading

10. The Audit

    WaPo Finds Stimulus Bucks Going Further

    April 8, 2009 09:27 AM

    The Washington Post has a piece of good news (really!) on its front page today: We're going to get more bang for our stimulus buck. Construction firms, last seen building white elephant condo towers and strip malls, lately sitting... Continue reading

11. The Audit

    Doing the Math on Online Subscriptions

    April 7, 2009 05:10 PM

    Martin Langeveld over at the Nieman Journalism Lab runs some back-of-the-envelope calculations on whether charging online can work for newspapers and concludes that it can't. It's an interesting experiment, but I think he makes some key assumptions along the... Continue reading

12. The Audit

    Resurgent WSJ Marches Into Glorious Future

    April 7, 2009 02:39 PM

    Here's an interesting thought experiment: What do you get when a longtime Rupert Murdoch newspaper interviews one of Murdoch's key employees about one of Murdoch's newer papers? A story like this: Resurgent Wall Street Journal rallies as crisis rips... Continue reading

13. The Audit

    NYT Looks at the Economy’s Lost Years

    April 7, 2009 08:54 AM

    The New York Times has an interesting angle on the economy this morning, looking at how far the deep downturn has set back the forward march of progress (so to speak) and how hard it will be to catch... Continue reading

14. The Audit

    Good Wall Street Journal Op-ed on the Bubble’s Advent

    April 6, 2009 03:17 PM

    The Wall Street Journal's editorial page runs a must-read today on why the housing bubble has caused so much more damage than the tech bubble did earlier this decade. It's interesting that the two economists, Steven Gjerstad and Vernon... Continue reading

15. The Audit

    Unemployment Rate Misses True Labor Picture, Bloomberg Says

    April 6, 2009 09:50 AM

    Bloomberg has a nice story today on how the unemployment rate is woefully understating the amount of pain in the labor markets—and at 8.5 percent, that's saying something. But using the broader U-6 measure, which includes conventional unemployment, as... Continue reading

16. The Audit

    Bloomberg Looks at What Toxic Assets Might Be Worth

    April 3, 2009 02:18 PM

    We've been asking for a while now for a story that would delve into what seems to me the core issue in the financial crisis and the trillions of dollars of taxpayer money spent or lent on bailouts: How much... Continue reading

17. The Audit

    NYT’s False Balance on AIG Ex-CEO Greenberg

    April 3, 2009 11:27 AM

    Jay Rosen points me to a story on AIG in The New York Times this morning and asks if a "'he said, she said' story is the best the New York Times can do with (an) ex-AIG... Continue reading

18. The Audit

    FT: Wall Street Sees a New Shell Game

    April 3, 2009 09:08 AM

    The Financial Times fronts an important story today that shows the ridiculousness of several things, including our banking system and, yes, our banking bailout system. This is of the increasingly common brand of financial crisis news that's astonishing, but... Continue reading

19. The Audit

    The WSJ Singles on Sports Subsidies

    April 2, 2009 06:28 PM

    The Journal has a pretty good story today on corporate welfare for sports teams. This one's about the Boston Red Sox getting a new spring-training stadium in Fort Myers, Florida, whose fortunes have been brutalized by the housing bust... Continue reading

20. The Audit

    “Heard” In a Graduate Seminar

    April 2, 2009 01:10 PM

    The Wall Street Journal today tosses off one of the more disappointing pieces I've read in this crisis—and that's saying something. The fact that it runs as a Heard on the Street is doubly disappointing. Far from a fact-based,... Continue reading

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