News of the weird and an interview that wanted to write itself.
I must be one well-kept secret, because I've only been interviewed once [bulletin: make that three times! Woo-hoo!]. Even then, I had to set up the interview myself. And the result was, as I look back on it, almost certainly bogus.
Years ago clients of mine moved overseas and left their cat behind, in their house, to have it shipped when they found a new home. Right away this doesn't sound like a great idea, even without 20/20 hindsight, but my clients had arranged for a trusted friend to care for the cat who would check in daily to make sure it had food and water. This arrangement went on for a week or so without incident, but one day the friend checked in and found, not the cat, but a note from PETA, a militant animal-rights group that takes "direct action" whenever it thinks it's run across inhumane treatment of animals, claiming the organization found the cat abandoned and rescued it.
At any rate, that was the friend's story. Even then I wondered if maybe she hadn't left a door open and started improvising when the cat went missing. Now I'm almost sure of it, and the part of me that isn't still believes in Santy Claus. Because the idea that PETA, an outfit that, at least to us, looked like the Symbionese Liberation Army of the animal-rights world, would swoop down on a comfortable suburban home and abduct one pampered if possibly lonely kitty...it's a stretch. But my distraught clients bought the story and, needless to say, desperately wanted their cat back. Someone—it must have been me—suggested I contact a newspaper reporter I knew, a tenant in a building I managed, to get the word out.
I was happy to help, but if this story struck me as an improbable mixture of tragedy and farce, I was pretty sure it'd strike 99 percent of the newspaper's readership that way too. I felt for my clients, but this wasn't something I wanted to have haunt me every time I talked to a potential client. "Hey, aren't you that guy who...wait a second...it's coming back...something about a kidnapped cat...some terrorist animal-rights group...something wild like that. (Peers at me closely.) How'd you get hooked up with that?"
So I was a lousy interview. I didn't let the reporter use my name, which meant he didn't get any juicy quotes, which meant the story lacked the sparkle and zip that sells news of the weird. It did, however, run on the first page of the second section, which is typically where they run news of the weird.
The cat never showed up. From what little I know of cats, it probably found a comfy new home in the same neighborhood.
So I'm one agent who's never grabbed the spotlight and, with any luck, never will. But some agents do get calls from reporters. One of those "celeb" agents is in my office, and at a recent office meeting he told the following story.
Back in September 2008 a reporter for the town's newspaper called to get his read on how local real estate was weathering the credit market meltdown. The reporter was young and, as so many reporters tasked with real estate reporting seem to be, unfamiliar with real estate. For example, she didn't know what a "jumbo" loan is. To be fair, lots of non-real estate experts don't know what a jumbo loan is, but very few of them get paid to explain real estate to the public. So this agent spent an hour or so patiently explaining to the reporter, in great detail, why what was happening in local real estate didn't match the popular perception of what was happening.
A perception perpetuated, you may have noticed, by the media. Even, apparently, among the media, an example of reporting imitating, not life, but reporting. Maybe the media likes chasing its tail.
This agent would patiently explain to the reporter why local real estate wasn't going to hell in a hand basket (this was just before the stock market crashed and local real estate went to hell in a hand basket). Then the reporter would say, "Would it be fair to say that" and read to the agent some variation on the theme that local real estate was going to hell in a hand basket. Gradually it dawned on the agent that what the reporter was reading him were key points of a story she'd already written, points that had local real estate going to hell in a hand basket.
That bears repeating: the reporter had already written her story, out of her sketchy store of real estate knowledge, before she'd talked to a credible source. And even though her story wasn't the right story, it was the story she wanted to write. Because she already knew the story. No matter what a credible source—or at least someone with a different opinion—told her.
Hallelujah, eventually she got it. I read her story, unaware of how wrong-headed it had started out, a few days after the interview and marveled at its remarkably perceptive grasp of the notion that real estate is local and that real estate in our more-favored, more-affluent area wasn't going to hell in a hand basket just yet. But I have to wonder what direction that story would have taken if she'd talked, not to some illusion-puncturing real estate agent but to every reporter's best friend and fallback, the wooly real estate economist sure that if the market is crashing and burning in Modesto it's crashing and burning in Menlo Park.
No, I don't wonder how that story would look, because I've read it many times.
I will give this reporter full marks for not only asking the local real estate industry its opinion but eventually listening to it, because so much real estate reporting does neither. I should probably give her editor credit too. Together they gave their readers the balanced and insightful reporting the media promises and so infrequently delivers, either because it can't be bothered or because it doesn't know how—or because balanced reporting strays from the accepted script.
How did journalism come to this, and when? When did gut feel and "everyone knows" replace getting the facts straight? Do the journalism schools not teach balance and "shoe leather" anymore, or does the average editor not care anymore? Did he ever?
The notorious wheeling and dealing in pork that persuaded the House of Representatives to pass the Emergency Economic Stability Act of 2008 reminds me of the old saw that "politics is like sausage: you don't want to watch it being made".
To which we might add real estate reporting. Even when it turns out to be, despite its inclination, balanced real estate reporting.