https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/unfit-to-report/
Journalistic Ethics
The One Flew Over The Cokehead's Nest issue :: April 2, 2013
Unfit To Report
By Mark Ames
Just over a week ago, as we were just recovering from the first Print
Edition, my Twitter feed started getting bombarded with links to the
latest — and quite possibly the scummiest — Planet Money/This American
Life propaganda piece for the financial industry, disguised as highbrow
progressive journalism.
The piece was called "Unfit For Work: The Startling Rise of Disability
in America" and it essentially argued — using wildly flawed research and
straight-up lies — that our Social Security program is burdened by a
glut of freeloader disability queens, faking their disabilities in order
to live high on the Social Security disability insurance hog.
Why would NPR run such a flawed, biased story? The answer takes us right
to the heart of Wall Street’s plans to privatize government benefits,
which Wall Street bond holders want to slash for their own profits. This
battle pits powerful Wall Street interests and their media and political
lackeys on the one side, versus an overwhelming majority of Americans —
Republicans and Democrats both — on the other. In the middle stands a
radio piece from a trusted source, NPR/This American Life/Planet Money,
telling its progressive, educated audience that there is in fact a
problem with Social Security, and that problem is a bunch of human
parasites faking disability to suckle from the Social Security teat.
It’s the sort of rancid old 1930s anti-New Deal propaganda that the
American Liberty League or NAM or the Chamber of Commerce used to puke
out on a regular basis. But this is 2013, meaning this time around, the
battleground is on the putative left, pitting the Democratic Party
leaders including Obama against the people who voted for him, and who
have nowhere else to turn. On the Democratic Party’s side: their funders
on Wall Street, and their neoliberal propagandists in pundit-land and in
universities. The key isn’t winning over right-wing conservatives, but
rather affluent progressives — i.e., Planet Money's and NPR’s audience.
If they can flip that demographic, Social Security is privatized toast.
The good thing is that the piece was such obvious crap, so
intellectually flawed and propaganda-soaked, that Ira Glass and the This
American Life/Planet Money/NPR people were forced to respond to their
critics. The downside is that the critics were far too respectful,
basing their criticism on factual flaws rather than on the corruption
that made the flawed reporting not just possible, but inevitable.
Here's a U Illinois professor respectfully critiquing the piece on the
Huffington Post:
Ms. Joffe-Walt, who is neither an economist nor a specialist on
disability, is making a claim that in an economics class would be red
penciled with the corrective...
The logical error in her reporting comes from simply assuming that
the rising number of people on disability is the result of the collusion
between poor unemployed people and cash-strapped states. But the reality
may be closer to the fact that the Baby Boomer generation, as it ages,
becomes more and more subject to impairments that lead to disabilities.
Since a third of people with disabilities are those with mental
disorders, it is also no surprise that the dramatic rise in diagnoses of
depression, OCD, and autism in the same period have had an impact on
these statistics.
In These Times and the great Dean Baker also went after the Planet Money
piece with padded kid gloves; perhaps they were thrown off by the fatal
assumption that Planet Money and NPR are on the same progressive team as
they.
Only Media Matters offered something like a comprehensive critique of
the piece, debunking the Planet Money PR falsehoods one by one.
Not surprisingly, the right-wing blogosphere went ga-ga over Planet
Money’s attack on what we may as well call "disability queens":
Breitbart, that annoying mannequin-head from the National Review, Fox
Nation, and Drudge, to name a few. To welfare-bashers and wingers,
Planet Money’s hit piece on these manufactured disability queens was a
fine example of real investigative journalism.
As we reported last year at our SHAME Project and in my piece for the
NSFWCORP, Planet Money has a serious conflict-of-interest problem when
it reports on anything involving the banking sector. Planet Money’s sole
sponsor, as of late last year, is Ally Bank (formerly GMAC), one of the
world’s most toxic subprime lenders. Ally/GMAC preyed on Americans on
the upside, then plundered taxpayers for over $17 billion in TARP
bailout funds when their fraud schemes came crashing down. As we showed,
the disturbing overlap between GMAC’s lobbying efforts against bank
regulation bills, and Planet Money programs attacking that legislation
and its promoters, means that Planet Money has essentially doubled as a
sophisticated PR vessel targeting a key audience unaware of the Planet
Money/NPR financial arrangement with the banking industry.
The corrupt arrangement caught the attention of the New York Observer,
Fairness and Accuracy in Media, and others. Planet Money, This American
Life and NPR have all been party to journalistic fraud against their
audience, and they’re laughing all the way to the bailed-out bank with
the help of your NPR donation.
When you know that Planet Money’s sole sponsor is a predatory lender,
this hit-piece on Social Security "disability queens" makes an appalling
sort of sense. Social Security is actually a fully funded and
well-managed program. That’s precisely why Wall Street has been trying
to grab it for years. When furious NPR viewers objected to seeing their
donations funding anti-Social Security propaganda, Ira Glass felt
compelled to issue this statement standing by the reporting: "We know of
no factual errors. We stand by the story."
Yet, as a Wired reporter pointed out, Planet Money did alter the online
version of the show after listeners raised a fuss. NPR finally admitted
that the text had been altered, lamely explaining that "sentences were
changed for clarity after publication."
This is the sort of thing you expect from a Murdoch operation, not from
NPR or This American Life. But why would any honorable NPR staffers go
along with this sleazy project? Well, to put it bluntly, the staff of
Planet Money are pretty sleazy themselves. Here’s a brief summary of
their sordid publication histories:
In 2010, Chana Joffe-Walt co-authored with Adam Davidson an
appalling piece of "blame-the Greeks" propaganda that could have been
written by a giant bond fund. (Oddly enough, half the piece takes place
in the offices of PIMCO, the world’s largest bond fund.) Their piece
blames Greece’s debt problems squarely on the bad big-spending Greek
government and Greek public-sector workers like teachers. And, while
vilifying teachers, Joffe-Walt and Davidson portray bond magnates as
helpless well-meaning victims. Here’s a part of the transcript:
ADAM DAVIDSON: Chana, I think this is where I should come in,
because I actually do know where the money came from. I know where
Greece got that money and it wasn't from heaven. It was from Newport
Beach... PIMCO decided, hey, let's take a second look at Greece. Let's
start lending them money. Let's buy a bunch of their bonds. And PIMCO
was not the only one.
Mr. SCOTT MATHER (PIMCO): And the market was basically giving
Greece the benefit of the doubt, because they were a eurozone member,
part of the club.
DAVIDSON: Sure, Greece's governments were famous for their long
history of lousy financial management. But now they promised to act like
grownups, to be responsible… And Scott figured even if Greece did screw
up, the richer countries would step in and help them out.
CHANA JOFFE-WALT: That's a nice crystal ball.
DAVIDSON: ..Right. So PIMCO starts lending the country money at
rates closer to what those Germans and Finns are paying. And that makes
all loans in Greece cheaper, not just government loans. And this goes on
for nearly a decade.
JOFFE-WALT: And so back in Greece, 2009, there's a new government
that comes into power and the new government makes a surprise
announcement. They say, remember how the previous guys said that our
deficit was six percent? It's actually twice that.
DAVIDSON: The traders at PIMCO, like bond traders all over the
world, were shocked. They were furious.
Yes, they were shocked! Shocked I tell ya! They had no idea in 2009 such
a thing was possible — just as shocked as they were the year before, in
2008, when they overleveraged and destroyed the entire global financial
system.
Davidson and Joffe-Walt continue on with their PIMCO propaganda piece:
DAVIDSON: This is Mohamed El-Erian. He is the CEO of PIMCO. And he
says when they told Greece no more loans, we're not buying anymore of
your bonds, the Greek government asked them to reconsider.
Dr. El-ERIAN: The Greek government came with lots of offerings.
DAVIDSON: Did they come to you directly?
Dr. El-ERIAN: They did come to us directly, via our offices in
Germany and London. And we said thank you, but no thank you.
DAVIDSON: Not just PIMCO, most bond buyers all over the world were
saying: No, Greece. We won't lend you money. We won't buy your bonds.
The governments of Europe though, said okay, Greece. We'll bail you out
but only if you stop paying all those teachers, and postal workers, and
lake dryer-uppers all that money.
I have to stop here and repeat what Adam Davidson just said there,
defending PIMCO against "teachers, and postal workers, and lake
dryer-uppers." So we’re now to lump together teachers, postal workers
and "lake-dryer-uppers." That’s what an education from the University of
Chicago will get you.
Back to the Davidson & Joffe-Walt PIMCO show:
JOFFE-WALT: Which pretty much brings us up to date, the Greek
people are really mad.
(Soundclip of chanting protestors)
DAVIDSON: And the guys at PIMCO understand that. The Greek
government made some bad choices and now the Greek citizens are being
asked to pay for them, with their salaries and their pensions. And Scott
Mather says it's not just Greece.
Mr. MATHER: Most of the developed world is screwed. So the rich
world has continued to spend more than they’ve made for decades. To us,
the most startling thing is this disconnect where people think there is
some easier way out. There is no easy way out.
JOFFE-WALT: Greece may be one of the worst examples, but almost
every developed country - including the U.S...
DAVIDSON: Especially, Chana, the U.S.
JOFFE-WALT: Especially the U.S., every country has been borrowing
more than they can pay back without making difficult choices; without
raising taxes or spending less.
So the mystery of Chana Joffe-Walt’s ideological baggage is solved:
She’s an austerity-theorist, just like her boss Adam Davidson and just
like their show’s sole sponsor, Ally Bank (which just happened to take
over $17 billion in taxpayer bailout money). No blame from Chana
Joffe-Walt for the financial industry, despite all the illegal,
fraudulent, corrupt things they’ve been caught doing over and over and
over to profit off debt. No, Chana believes it’s all the teachers,
postal workers, and lake-dryer-uppers’ fault. She also wants you to know
that without "difficult" choices, such as robbing your pensions and
reducing your income, America will turn into Greece, that terrible
place, full of lake-dryer-uppers.
Chana Joffe-Walt’s job, selling bank propaganda to ostensibly
progressive media, seems to run in her family. Chana’s brother, Benjamin
Joffe-Walt, works in the heart of the Mega-Bank propaganda business, as
a Washington DC-based "Strategic Communications & Public Relations
Specialist" currently heading Change.org’s public relations.
Benjamin is using Change.org exactly the same way his sister is using
NPR: exploiting a trusted source to churn out corporate PR. Change.org
used to be one of the most successful progressive grassroots organizing
outfits, a site for online petitions that translate into political
action. Then late last year, Change.org was furtively taken over by the
PR industry, monetizing the credibility Change.org had built up and
making it available to front-groups, the public relations industry and
advertisers.
Last year, Ryan Grim at the Huffington Post exposed Change.org internal
memos laying out the group’s transformation into a fake-progressive front:
Change.org, the online social movement company founded on
progressive values, has decided to change its advertising policy to
allow for corporate advertising, Republican Party solicitations,
astroturf campaigns, anti-abortion or anti-union ads and other
controversial sponsorships, according to internal company documents.
Like his sister Chana Joffe-Walt, Benjamin Joffe-Walt used to call
himself a journalist. Then he filed for The Guardian a wildly false
story about a Chinese pro-democracy dissident, a story which a Guardian
editor said "threatened the credibility of the Guardian’s reporting in
China." Benjamin reported seeing Chinese dissident Lu Banglie beaten by
Chinese authorities so badly that "his eye [lay] out of his socket" and
"the ligaments in his neck were broken." So the Guardian arranged an
independent medical examination for Lu Banglie, and, according to the
Independent...
It soon emerged there was..."a huge disparity" between the report
and reality. Lu Banglie's neck was not broken, nor had his eye come out
of its socket. Indeed, just two days after publishing the tale of his
apparent demise, The Guardian reported that Lu Banglie was alive and
determined to continue his pro-democracy activities. A subsequent
medical examination, arranged by the newspaper, revealed that he had "no
serious injuries". Ian Mayes reported that, among Guardian readers,
"Relief that Lu Banglie had survived was mixed with serious concern
about grave flaws in the correspondent's report."
Today, Chana Joffe-Walt’s brother works for a fake-progressive front
group and his job is "placement" in major media. From his bio:
He leads a global team of communications specialists presenting
Change.org to a wide range of audiences. Prominent placements have
included TIME, New York Times, Washington Post, Guardian, Bloomberg,
Fortune, Businessweek, CNN, The Daily Show, Ellen...."
In other words, Joffe-Walt’s brother’s job is to convince media outlets
to run stories he’s pushing for. This is interesting because both
brother and sister work for major ostensibly-progressive outfits, both
of which are now being exploited as message-dumps for Wall Street. This
is, at the very least, an interesting coincidence. Which brings me to
the last interesting thing I noticed: The Planet Money/This American
Life/NPR hit-piece on Social Security lists as its sponsor the Lincoln
Financial Group.
That’s interesting because the Lincoln Financial Group, like Ally
Bank/GMAC, took bailout money through a sneaky way: It bought a
collapsed thrift, Newton County Loan and Savings, for pennies on the
dollar, then reclassified itself as a banking institution, and voila!
Lincoln qualified for nearly 1 billion dollars in taxpayer TARP funds!
The TARP inspector general, Neil Barofsky, singled out Lincoln for
criticism:
In a December report, Barofsky showed how insurance giants Hartford
Financial Services Group Inc. and Lincoln National Corp. bought tiny
thrifts -- one with just $7 million in assets -- to qualify for the TARP
Capital Protection Program, which is designed to encourage bank lending.
Hartford and Lincoln used the more than $4.3 billion in TARP funds they
received almost entirely to finance insurance operations, according to
the report. "Treasury didn’t have to approve that," Barofsky says.
Lincoln Financial Group — a sponsor of the Planet Money hit piece on
Social Security disability — is listed as one of the largest
finance-insurance companies in America, with over $141 billion in assets
(the holding company’s name is Lincoln National Group, but the public
name is "Lincoln Financial Group"). One of its subsidiaries, Lincoln
Financial Media, owns some 14 radio stations across America. The
Philadelphia Eagles play at Lincoln Financial Field.
Among the products that Lincoln Financial Group sells is, you guessed
it, disability insurance.
So unless it’s a complete coincidence that Lincoln Financial’s ads keep
popping up as the Planet Money sponsor for the show about disability
queens, it looks like once again, Planet Money, This American Life and
NPR have the same "failure to communicate their conflict-of-interest and
media corruption" problem that we wrote about last summer. They’ve done
nothing to address the corruption in their editorial process. No one is
holding Planet Money, This American Life or NPR accountable for clear
conflict-of-interest.
But perhaps NPR doesn’t give a shit. In their corporate sponsors page,
NPR openly boasts that paying NPR to read your company’s name has a
"halo effect" —that is, having a harmless squeaky progressive-sounding
NPR voice reading out your company’s name essentially helps to whitewash
the corporate sponsor’s brand reputation. That can really come in handy
if you’re one of the banks that pocketed billions in taxpayer money and
now you’re lobbying to cut Social Security benefits:
Sponsorships: Halo Effect Corporate sponsors are interested in
exposure to the well-educated, relatively affluent NPR audience (both
on-air and online), which can be difficult to reach through other media.
Selective sponsors also value association with the NPR brand. Messages
acknowledging our sponsors are presented on-air in short announcements,
and are presented visually and in audio on NPR.org and other digital
services. Over the last ten years, NPR's sponsorship program has enjoyed
strong growth.
NPR's digital sponsorship revenue continues to grow in spite of the
weakened advertising and sponsorship market.
Corporate sponsors tend to stick with NPR as they find value in the
"halo effect" of a positive association with the NPR brand.
So, as the financial lobby and the DC political class close in for the
kill on your Social Security, you should be aware that Planet Money,
This American Life and NPR are key players on the left flank of the
bankers’ propaganda war. If you’re one of their listeners or donors,
you’re a target. Welcome to what passes for the "liberal" media.
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