Rupert Murdoch and the Corporate Culture of News Corp. On the pressing question of how much Rupert Murdoch is a part of the corrupt culture at News Corporation, I wrote that Murdoch is the culture. Nodding to Jay Rosen, I posited that its entire reason for being is to reflect, imitate, and amplify Murdoch himself, which is how a single individual can end up wielding such outsized, globe-spanning power.
The Murdoch Pushback: Attacking the Press: As friends, sympathizers and people on Rupert Murdoch’s payroll attacked the media for blowing the hacking scandal out of proportion, I rounded up publicly reporteed evidence of the crimes and coverups at News International to show how this is one of the biggest media stories in history.
Nonprofit News and the Tax Man: The burgeoning nonprofit-news movement faces a new hurdle: The IRS, which is scrutinizing new applications for tax-exempt status—and delaying them for years.
CNBC Misleads on “Welfare State” Dominance: I figured this false CNBC story, headlined “Welfare State: Handouts Make Up One-Third of U.S. Wages,” was genetically engineered to go viral and tried to head it off by showing how wrong it was. It went big anyway, on blogs and in the mainstream press, and I followed up on what it showed about how A Zombie Lie Is Born.
The Myth of Income Equality, Courtesy of AEI: The think tank showed how to combine the worst tendencies of Slate (contrarian shtick), Business Insider (misleading, hyped headlines), and think tanks (paid-for spin), and put it in internet-friendly listicle. I followed up after AEI responded.
Elizabeth Warren Is Smeared, and the Press Is Along for the Ride: Press coverage of Warren’s congressional testimony was about as pure an example of he said-she said reporting as you’ll see and a good showcase for why such false equivalence is a bad thing for readers.
ESPN Obscures Its Own Role in the Conference Realignment Mess: As television money and ESPN’s business relationships helped cause major realignments in college sports conferences this year, I took a look at how poorly the network covered its own role.
GE Flubs a Pushback Against The New York Times: General Electric went into full public-relations pushback mode after the Times’s damaging story on its corporate income taxes. In doing so, the company, unable to get its own story straight, compounded the damage.
McClatchy Misses on Cotton Speculators: The newspaper chain asserted that Wall Street caused a cotton bubble, but didn’t back it up well enough, as a look at historical prices shows.
Gannett’s Multimillionaires Regret to Inform 700 Workers of Their Layoffs: As the newspaper giant cut more jobs, I took a look at its securities filings to calculate how many jobs its lavishly paid executives could have saved by becoming mere millionaires.
A Triangle Shirtwaist-Like Disaster, Buried By the U.S. Press: What a tragedy in Bangladesh shows about trade and the modern economy—and how the press covers it.
The Shorter-Form Journal: A look at how The Wall Street Journal’s trademark longform journalism has declined in the Murdoch era.
NYT Paywall to Other Papers: “Copy Me!” A look at the numbers shows the Times’s new paywall is an unqualified success.
Business Insider and Financial Press Sensationalism: How Henry Blodget & Co. stroke the id of the internet.
I think the stories covering the massive financial frauds and the hesitancy of the government to prosecute them should rank in there too, especially the ones which beat back the right wing "the government did it through freddie and fannie" meme that has been fought for the past 3 to 4 years.
Speaking of which, a pretty decent piece by William Black came up on the web recent like:
http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2011/12/fannie-and-freddie-fantasies/
"We need to be blunt about the source of Wallison’s thesis. Wallison is one of the leading architects of the global financial crisis in his capacity as AEI’s long-time co-director of their financial deregulation program. ">He pushed the criminogenic three “de’s”: deregulation, desupervision, and de facto decriminalization. He criticized Fannie and Freddie for not making greater amounts of nonprime loans. He is desperately seeking to escape accountability for his major role in creating a global crisis. He is an ideologue who would have been fired by AEI had he supported financial reregulation. His thesis that the crisis was really caused by the government forcing the politically powerless Fannie and Freddie to make suicidal loans is a desperate effort to save himself and his ideology.
Wallison’s thesis cannot survive the laugh test. It requires that, for over a decade in which the Republicans had control over the Congress and/or the White House Fannie and Freddie’s CEOs knew they were purchasing loans that would eventually prove catastrophic for Fannie and Freddie, the lenders (loan sales to Fannie and Freddie are made with recourse back to the seller), and for the (poorer minorities) purchasing the homes. No one at Fannie and Freddie leaks this to the Republican Congress or the Bush White House even though such leaks would have (under Wallison’s thesis) provided the mother of all Democrat-bashing congressional hearings. No one at OFHEO, including Bush’s old friend, and strong Republican, James Lockhart (the guy running OFHEO), informs Bush that Fannie and Freddie are headed for catastrophe because the Democrats have forced them to purchase suicidal loans to poorer minorities (i.e., the base of the Democratic Party)...
The question was why Fannie and Freddie suddenly began to buy enormous amounts of largely fraudulent nonprime paper in 2005. They did so, as the repeated investigations have found, for the same reason that Fannie and Freddie engaged in accounting control fraud earlier in the decade – it makes the controlling officers wealthy. It is a “sure thing.” What I have added is the relevant time line explaining the role that Fannie and Freddie’s earlier accounting control frauds, and the modest sanctions levied by the SEC and OFHEO, played in explaining why they went so heavily into fraudulent nonprime paper around 2005.
Wallison has been conspicuously silent in demanding that elite CEO frauds that drove this crisis be prosecuted. I ask him, and I ask reporters who discuss any story with him, whether he will now demand that we end the de facto decriminalization of the fraudulent CEOs who drive our financial crises and become wealthy through their frauds."
I think he oversells it a bit with the "If one had to pick one person in the private sector most responsible for causing the global financial crisis it would be Wallison," but other than that, spot on.
#1 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Sat 31 Dec 2011 at 07:42 PM
Crumb bums.
My Wallison link got borked. I was sure I dotted all the t's and crossed the i's. Serves me right for not using the preview button.
http://www.benzinga.com/life/politics/11/01/820440/wallison-reinvents-history-%E2%80%93-and-his-own-positions-on-the-causes-of-the-c
#2 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Sat 31 Dec 2011 at 07:49 PM