Time to run "nattering nabobs of negativism" up the flagpole again?
Some of you may remember this jauntily alliterative phrase, uttered by the undistinguished Spiro T. Agnew, Nixon's first Vice-President and the tip of his spear in the War Against Journalism. When we heard it back then, most of us laughed and shook our heads. Just what the heck was a "nabob" anyway?
But I'm thinking it's time to dust off "nattering nabobs" and run it up the flag pole again. And this time, this old McCarthy (Gene, not Joe) fan will find himself saluting it.
Once you hack away the dense underbrush, "nattering nabobs of negativism" refers to a cabal of know-nothing reporters whose work is irresponsible because it doesn't tell the whole truth. It's an old lament still heard today, as in "Why don't you report the good things?"
"Nattering nabobs" won't hold much credibility if you believe, as I once did, that all reporters are all-seeing, all-knowing Bob Woodwards heroically telling us the truth come hell or high water. But if you ever need a cleansing, curative dose of disillusionment with the mass media, have it turn its wide and shallow spotlight on something you know. Like your livelihood.
Most of you will miss this instructive opportunity because your field, whatever it is—software design, small appliance repair, dog walking—will never be front-page news, day after day, month after month, year after year. Whatever you do is probably covered by, and will always probably be covered only by, a specialized trade media, written only for experts like you and read only by experts like you. An expert audience demands the expert reporting that comes only from journalists well-versed in the field, either through direct experience or by close observation over a long period of time.
By contrast, there's the mass media. Particularly its coverage of the latest fad.
After watching the print and broadcast media "cover" real estate, I've come to these conclusions:
Sound a bit harsh? I'll give you two examples. They're book-ends. The first opened my eyes to this charade several years ago. The second happened just last week.
For years I faithfully subscribed to (and actually read) a well-known and trusted consumer finance magazine. The stock market was booming and, according to this usually conservative publication, the boom was real and never-ending. So the bust left this magazine with some explaining to do. First it tried blaming reader greed and stupidity. This went over about as well as you'd think, so the magazine hastily shelved this strategy for a one-issue mea culpa followed by a longer period of shrill finger-pointing at Wall Street. But none of this solved the magazine's real problem: Main Street no longer cared about Wall Street. Wall Street, even its seamy underside, didn't sell magazines anymore.
So just re-arranging the deck chairs wasn't going to help. What to do?
The well-known and trusted consumer finance magazine decided to follow its readers or, more precisely, follow the money pouring into the market its readers did suddenly care about, real estate. But this time, the well-known and trusted consumer finance magazine silently vowed, no one could ever accuse it of being in bed with the industry it covered. The courtly old gentleman would grow fangs.
The first use of these fangs was startling, at least to this reader: a vicious attack on the real estate industry, based on urban legend and bad academic research (and there's little difference). Not only was the subject and flesh-tearing style new to the magazine, so was the byline over the story. Indignant, I sent an email to this new Senior Editor, more-or-less politely pointing out the obvious flaws in his story. He responded by thanking me for my "reasoned approach", then defended himself, not with examples from real life, but with more academic studies. He closed by inviting me to learn the sordid truth about my profession "should I wish to pursue it".
"Old boy."
I was flabbergasted. Who was this arrogant twit? I Googled Senior Editor and discovered that his first high-profile reporting assignment had been a recent hit piece for the well-known and trusted consumer finance magazine on the allegedly questionable accounting practices of a huge and widely-admired corporation. I vaguely remembered the story. But I clearly remembered how indignant I'd been that this huge corporation could get away with whatever it was they were getting away with. Now I found myself wondering if maybe my indignation had been skillfully manipulated. Now I found myself wondering if I should feel cheap and used. Now I found myself knowing how Pavlov's dogs felt. Ring! salivate ring! salivate.
I also discovered that before this big accounting "expose" Senior Editor had reported on, no, not the real estate industry, but the tech sector. And in 1989, when I was entering the business he breezily assured me he knew better than I, Senior Editor had just been hatched out of a history major and was covering, no, not real estate, but a pumpkin festival, in pallid prose, for a small-town newspaper. So let's review Senior Editor's real estate industry-busting credentials. No experience selling real estate. No experience covering real estate. This, gentle reader, is your newly-anointed real estate authority, coming at you loud and clear from the hallowed halls of a well-known and well-trusted old-line media empire.
Oy.
At this point I stopped working on the rebuttal I never sent, because it hit me like a piano dropped off a ten-story building that Senior Editor and the well-known and well-trusted consumer finance magazine he wrote for weren't interested in truth. Senior Editor was what Gore Vidal calls a "literary gangster", a hit man bought off with a byline, interested only in doing his job: restoring the magazine's circulation by covering the latest fad in a way that pandered to the prejudices of the lowest common denominator likely to read a magazine without moving its lips. "We're hip, everyone's a crook except you and me, we're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore." In the war for readers, truth had been the first casualty.
And maybe truth had gone missing from the well-known and well-trusted consumer finance magazine years ago, and I just hadn't noticed until it blundered into a field I knew. Come to think of it, their stock market coverage had always relied heavily on academic studies. And none of their writers had ever said things like, "Back when I was running money", probably because none of them had ever run money. Had I pulled back the curtain only to find that the Wizard was nothing more than a little man with big special effects? Were the blind leading the blind?
No. The blind were leading the blind were leading the blind. I read the smoke screen of academic studies Senior Editor threw at me, and as many others as I could find. Through them I slipped reluctantly into a bizarre parallel real estate universe of naiveté, careerism, bad data, and square pegs earnestly pounded into round holes to fit accepted academic thinking, all of it legitimatized by the impenetrable language of statistical analysis. I have yet to run across a real estate economist whose curriculum vitae claims experience in real estate. Keeps 'em pure, I guess. So rather than depend on the insights that come only from real-world experience, they get to play with the statistical techniques that lured them into economics in the first place. Think myopic Martians spying on Earth through the wrong ends of their telescopes. Ordinarily this would be either merely laughable or, at worst, a tragic waste of grad school—in either case, no harm, no foul. But "publish or perish" academia shovels this stuff out as fast as it can into the waiting arms of the mass media, who shovels it as fast as it can into the living room of John Q. Public, who inhales it as revealed scientific truth.
This personal epiphany occurred in 2003. Now fast forward to October 2006 and a locally-produced news program that, like the magazine I just mentioned, claims to do thoughtful reporting and, like the magazine, shall remain nameless. In one recent segment this program reported on the downturn in the California real estate market. Highlights included a Beverley Hills seller desperate enough to throw in an "exotic sports car", and the news (delivered in a professionally earnest, alarmed tone) that foreclosures are skyrocketing. At the program's end, the host made the obligatory attempt at responsible journalism by asking the reporter if coverage like this might not make a bad situation worse. The reporter hit this softball right out of the park with "it's our job to report the facts, and these are the facts".
Not quite. I have your facts right here.
First, your reporting covered only the top end of the Southern California market. So what if Beverley Hills or new waterfront condos aren't selling? That's 1 percent of the market. Tell me about the other 99 percent. Tell me about the mainstream market, the real homes real people buy.
Second, that "exotic sports car" turns out to be a Maserati sedan with two years left on its lease. If some Beverley Hills exhibitionist wants to give away something he can't (read the lease) instead of just cutting the price of his home, that's fine with me. At least he got his fifteen minutes. At least he didn't go on Jerry Springer. Just don't make him the poster child for every home seller. That's not accurate reporting.
And yes, foreclosures have gone up dramatically, but only because they've been abnormally low for years, and any increase in that microscopic number would be a dramatic increase. As of late 2006 the foreclosure rate is still well below the historical average, and still well below the point where it would begin to affect the overall real estate market. That's the important point. That's the point that wasn't reported.
So there's your mass media real estate reporting. Maybe Spiro's speechwriter had a point.
So I'm thinking that maybe this market slump is a blessing in disguise for a real estate industry that's been badly over-media-ed for the past few years. Frumpy real estate now knows what celebrity is, and it's not all it's cooked up to be.
Much more of this fifteen-minutes-of-fame stuff and real estate might have to go into a witness protection program.