Sheer, Bob. Journalism and the financial crisis. 6 December 2010
From Driscollwiki
Sheer, Bob. Truthdig. 6 Dec 2010.
News journalism
Early experience at LA Times
- Rigorous conflict of interest standards
- "No freebies"
Setting a standard for reliability, accuracy on the Internet
- Sense of respect and readership
Writers get paid for syndication
- "Forced a lot of sites to pay for syndication..."
- "Go after every one of them for at least 10$"
- "Most sites ... Huffington Post ... don't pay"
Attempted to start paying $1/word
An "eat your vegetables site"
- No sex, etc. link bait
- Have had to go to "bigger and bigger servers"
Reading the stats, server logs
Tyranny of the internet is the money
- How are you going to pay to send the reporters on foreign/investigative assignments?
- Truthdig bureau
Clickthroughs
- Sites claim so many million readers but ... what were they reading?
- 4-5 to every copy sold
Churn
- At least half of your circulation were people trying not to be part of your circulation
- "Lie like crazy to the advertisers", advertisers really did not know if the ards were working
- "You can sell any ads you want ... but they'll have a clickthrough ... they'll know exactly how many people clicked on the ad"
Founders had in mind the press that "anyone can own"
- At least white men
- Broadsheets, pamphleteers
Failure of old media in relation to financial crisis
- Financial gimmicks "unknown to Adam Smith ... Ronald Reagan ... George W. Bush"
- Compromising politics, campaign financing
- Discredited the banking system
Clinton campaign, Welfare Reform, "Project Success"
- Sheer was working at LA Times
- Little Rock file on Clinton was "all sex"
- Came in an "immediately betrayed" it
Reagan years
- Radical deregulation == removing fraud protections
- GE Capital responsible for 2/3rd of its profits
Clinton made Reagan promises a reality
- Phil and Wendy Graham come to place
- Wendy Graham on the board of Enron
- Clinton had tightened regulation in response to savings and loan
- Reish
- Rubin: Top democrat on Wall Street
- Clinton to Rubin: What do we have to do to get Wall Street on our side?
- Rubin to Clinton: You need to get rid of your onerous New Deal regulation [preventing invertment banks and commercial banks from merging]
- Clinton made peace with Alan Greenspan
- Clinton appointed someone from Goldman Sachs to cabinet
Citicorp merged with Traveler's Insurance (who owned investment banks)
- With blessings of Fed
Congresspeople relying on expertise of friendly-seeming lobbyists
- Lobbyists are writing the bill
- Where are the media?
- Bill Sapphire was the only one not asleep at the wheel
Jesse Unruh, the legendary speaker of the California state assembly, famously said that "if you canât take their money, drink their whiskey, screw their women, and vote against âem anyway, you donât belong in the Legislature.â
Media wanted the Telecomm Act of 1996
- "Opening the door to absolute disaster"
- Ideological contact between this and other forms of deregulation
Bush to Paulsen of Goldman-Sachs, how did this happen?
- Paulsen, "we were the ones responsible"
NYT coverage, April 8, 1998 on Citicorp/ Traveler's Insurance
Rubin pushes through legislation that enables merger
- And is then hired for $15m/year
Lawrence Summers "routinely referred to as brilliant"
- Commodity future, Title III and IV
- Pushed through dereg that enabled new financial instruments
Great claim of the Clinton years
- That the middle class were strengthened
- While policies were passed to undermine them
Why this is a "scam"?
- Targeting the mortgage broke a trust
- The home, the mortgage is supposed to be the secure, solid foundation
- "Risk management" and securitized financial
- MERS, Mortgage Electronic Registration System
- Blurring the history of a property
- Fanny and Freddie were the "gatekeepers"
- Bonuses for their employees were based on the valuation of their stock
