Bloomberg News has an interesting story on a dispute between a Utah restaurant and Visa and Mastercard.
The card companies say the restaurant was lax about protecting card numbers that ended up being used in more than a million dollars worth of fraud—something the restaurant’s owners deny.
What’s stunning is that the bank just started withdrawing money from the restaurant’s account without having any finding of fact, much less a court ruling:
In September 2008, the McCombs found that US Bancorp was taking money from its account, they said, with deductions eventually reaching $10,172. To prevent further seizures, they closed the account and found a new bank and processor, they said.
“It was at the end of the month and we had to pay our payroll,” Cissy McComb said. “Elavon was taking every dollar out of the account.”
Bloomberg doesn’t give us much context, which I’m sure is hard to come by. Namely, how often do card companies go after merchants?
This National Retail Federation quote makes it sound like this could be a much broader story:
“There’s a suspicion among many merchants that PCI (payment-card industry) is a near scam wrapped in good intentions,” Duncan said by phone from Washington. “The dissatisfaction with PCI and the financial consequences of it in the retail industry are rampant.”
— The New York Times goes page one with a report on a Gingrich-backing super-PAC running a vicious attack ad highlighting Mitt Romney’s private-equity career, which has become fertile ground for investigative journalists.
I thought it was overkill at first to put a story about an ad on page one, but this deserves it. Keep in mind this ad attacking predatory capitalism is supporting a Republican candidate:
This is probably the first political ad in history where someone says they might be taken out for talking negatively about a candidate:
You’re going to be on a hitlist, you know that?
Remarkable.
— Forbes’s Jon Bruner has a smart piece on journalism demographics.
He looked at LinkedIn profiles of journalists to get a glimpse at much we resemble average Americans:
Before going to News Foo, I built a Python script to scrape the LinkedIn profiles of everyone at the conference. Ten percent of the conference’s attendees went to Harvard. Of course, that’s not quite representative of the news industry as a whole; widening my LinkedIn search, I found that 2% of employees at a handful of national media outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post and Dow Jones, went to Harvard. That’s a much smaller number than the 10% for News Foo, but it’s still huge by the standards of America as a whole: my quick calculation suggests that about 0.03% of American adults went to Harvard. Someone sitting in the News Foo auditorium is over 300 times more likely than the average American to have gone to Harvard; an employee of one of the national news organizations I surveyed is over 50 times more likely than the average American to have gone to Harvard…
Journalists are also much more likely than Americans in general to live in New York or Washington. Seven percent of reporters live in the New York-White Plains metropolitan division, which is home to 3.8% of the American population. Five percent of reporters live in the Washington-Arlington-Alexandria metropolitan division, home to just 1.4% of the American population. So a reporter is nearly twice as likely as the average American to live in New York and three times as likely to live in Washington. That alone certainly engenders a unique cultural outlook.
The profile is interesting, but he (and you) shouldn't be generalizing it to journalists. You've got at least two layers of self-selection bias there -- not all journalists have a profile on LinkedIn, and not all journalists went to New Foo, whatever that is. You have here a very biased group of techie-type journos who live nearer whereever this gathering was, and who work at a place where the journos could get away from the desk to attend, presumably with an expense account. That's probably not a representative slice of American journalists.
So Bruner's attempt to generalize his work to journalists in general is complete crap, typical of the stuff published on Forbes I will add. Journos may be "out of touch" and have a "unique cultural outlook" but his piece does nothing to illustrate that. It is more like a run-of-the-mill internet poll than anything else. And probably has a similar demographic.
And @Ryan, I thought you were a media critic. Should you be highlighting and going along with this kind of deeply flawed work and worse, agreeing with it uncritically? I get that you thought the methods were cool and techie. But it doesn't say anything meaningful about journalists, and you probably shouldn't pretend that it does.
#1 Posted by James, CJR on Tue 10 Jan 2012 at 11:38 AM
James, I quote him pointing that out about News Foo:
"Of course, that’s not quite representative of the news industry as a whole; widening my LinkedIn search, I found that 2% of employees at a handful of national media outlets, including the New York Times, Washington Post and Dow Jones, went to Harvard."
If he were looking at all journalists nationwide, then just using LinkedIn would be a problem. I think it's fine when looking at a handful of national outlets.
#2 Posted by Ryan Chittum, CJR on Tue 10 Jan 2012 at 12:31 PM
@Ryan:
Okay, you called this piece, "Is the Media Out of Touch? A Look at the Numbers" a "smart piece." Is it a smart piece? Let's take a look.
He generalizes thus:
"Journalists are also much more likely than Americans in general to live in New York or Washington."
"Seven percent of reporters live in the New York-White Plains metropolitan division, which is home to 3.8% of the American population."
" Five percent of reporters live in the Washington-Arlington-Alexandria metropolitan division, home to just 1.4% of the American population."
" So a reporter is nearly twice as likely as the average American to live in New York and three times as likely to live in Washington. That alone certainly engenders a unique cultural outlook."
1) It is not accurate to generalize this kind of analysis to all reporters. especially not with actual percentages, which tend to lend legitimacy.
2) He mixes his very biased data with population and BLS data, which is extremely shoddy practice.
3) He also mixes his highly biased Foo News participants sample with a different biased sample -- the LinkedIn profiles (i.e., being on LinkedIn is a self-selection) of a "handful" of national media outlets, obviously not representative of American journalists either
4) He then tries to make the case that journalists are "out of touch" citing his "evidence" that I quoted above.
This is not a "smart piece." In fact, it is a piece of crap. The methods he used are literally useless as an analysis of the demographics of journalists, and the conclusions he reaches are utterly invalid. A better use of his data would be to describe the demographics of the convention (who were on LinkedIn) and thus available for inclusion. Same with the "national media outlet" data -- though it would be difficult to make the case that it was actually representative of that group. Does he know the proportion of national media journos that has a LinkedIn profile? I'd wager it's high, but how high, we don't know. Don't you think the journos not not LinkedIn are a little bit different, maybe a lot different, than those who are?
Look, this isn't a big deal. The analysis was a piece of crap that evidently dazzled you by the nerdy method of writing code to scrape LinkedIn data. My objection is that a smart reporter like you ought to be more discerning about this kind of shoddy work. It goes to your credibility. I think you know that I am a huge fan of yours, and highly respect your work on keeping business reporters on the straight and narrow. I would hope that my comment would serve to remind you to think a bit more critically about faux analyses like this and think twice about highlighting them as "a smart piece."
#3 Posted by James, CJR on Tue 10 Jan 2012 at 02:11 PM
James, for the win.
That Newt-Romney thing though: priceless. They're eating their own.
#4 Posted by Edward Ericson Jr., CJR on Tue 10 Jan 2012 at 04:07 PM
James,
I see what you're saying. I don't have a problem with using LinkedIn as he did--the limitations of that data are clear. But extrapolating it to "journalists" is a mistake. Saying something like "journalists on LinkedIn" or some such would have been the thing to do.
#5 Posted by Ryan Chittum, CJR on Tue 10 Jan 2012 at 06:55 PM
Thanks, @Ryan,
I'm with you on your last statement, but I disagree with your assertion that the limitations of LinkedIn data "are clear." If they were clear, Mr. Bruner wouldn't have been so foolish as to do this analysis and draw the conclusions that he drew, and you wouldn't have highlighted it as a "smart piece."
This is not nitpicking. This worthless analysis is likely to be picked up by the rightwing loonies to "prove" that journos are "liberal" and therefore everything they write has "liberal bias" and therefore worthless. You know the drill. In fact, if I were a betting man I'd lay down odds that Mr. Bruner wrote this horrendous piece for exactly that purpose -- to "prove" that journos are out of touch.
Journos may indeed be out of touch and have liberal bias, but this piece did nothing to illuminate that.
By the way, I am an epidemiologist and biostatistician with a masters degree and ten years of professional work in research design methodology and analysis. My complaint about this kind of crap analysis is serious and based on knowledge and substance. So I'm not just being contrarian or making wild claims when I say that the design and methodology is worthless and the conclusions he drew from that crap analysis are utterly invalid. I'm not trying to argue from authority, I am stating my qualifications to make the judgment.
Like I said, it's no big deal. I just hate to see a good journo lapse in his critical thinking when it comes to this kind of flimflammery. I'm still a big fan.
#6 Posted by James, CJR on Tue 10 Jan 2012 at 08:25 PM
James can huff... And he can puff...
But the simple fact of the matter is that every single academic study ever conducted has found a pervasive liberal bias among "professional journalists".
That's just the R-E-A-L-I-T-Y.
Don't bitch at Ryan about it...
Bitch at Harvard or Yale.
#7 Posted by padikiller, CJR on Wed 11 Jan 2012 at 12:57 PM
I also think the study was patently absurd.
How can one automatically extrapolate that a college education or even an Ivy education leads to cultural biases.
Having a degree is a pre-requisite for most journalism jobs, just as they are for most professional occupations -- doctors & dentists, lawyers, accountants, college professors & corporate executives.
Harvard-trained economists & University of New Hampshire-trained economists, I would argue, probably have more in common than sociologists emerging from those same institutions.
Just as cancer specialists from Yale or the University of Texas would have more in common than men or women who opted for careers as accountants from those same institutions.
When it comes to being connected to the masses, by the way, I would argue that simple income statistics & zip codes -- and not just saying Washington DC or New York -- have more in common.
Look at the voting patterns of the Uppeer East Side in New York as compared to the Bronx; Park Slope compared with Canarsie in Brooklyn.
Just way too much flab in the presentation.
In fact, I think that the entire discussion opens up more questions than it provides answers.
Finally, I'd be embarrassed to have issued such silly declarations.
It's a little like saying that I found hockey players in Canada but hardly any in South Florida, which means that they don't like hockey players down there & the people there are somehow failing morally.
cheers
Paul Sweeney
Austin
#8 Posted by Paul Sweeney, CJR on Thu 12 Jan 2012 at 03:49 PM
I do have another thought on the demographics story.
I was att a Starbucks in Greenwich Conn. a few months ago & while there bought a copy of The New York Times.
There was a picture of Angela Merkel on the front page & stories about the Euro Zone's debt crisis.
Out of curiosity, I asked a local cop if he recognized Chancellor Merkel:
"Do you know who thi lady is?" I asked.
Hie did not know.
My point is that, in Greenwich, the hedge fund capital of the world and a favorite bedroom communiity of investment bankers, more of the adult population would know who Angela Merkel is than most citizens anywhere.
That's their job.
It's a journalist's job to be informed and educated.
That's not true of a policeman or people in a lot of occupations.
(I recently read that a man was denied a job as a policemen because of a high IQ (on the ground that he'd get bored with mundane duties of a cop) & that the job-rejection was upheld by the courts.
I should think it's a positive that you found journalists aspire to having a good education.
Over & out/cheers
Paul Sweeney
#9 Posted by Paul Sweeney, CJR on Fri 13 Jan 2012 at 04:48 PM
There's a hidden story implied here. Journos don't make more money than anyone else - but they went to more upmarket colleges. The survey suggests journos are people who don't have to worry about money as much as do other college-educated people. Now, from what class do people who can afford to trade career income for career mission spring?
It's the same principle as all those college applications that have 'volunteered one summer to work with the poor' on them. Yes, and bright kids from more modest backgrounds have to bag groceries for their summer jobs. But which of the two items on a resume gets more favorable looks among chattering-class folks?
#10 Posted by Mark Richard, CJR on Wed 18 Jan 2012 at 04:52 PM