has anybody noticed that planet money can at times be strikingly conservative? i've grown, more and more, to dislike adam davidson in particular, who often comes off as a grinning stooge of some-such or other financial lobby, that who he has most recently interviewed. i don't have anything to say about what i think is the astonishing ignorance, not to mention outright rudeness, that he displayed in his interview with elizabeth warren--not, anyway, anything that everyone else hasn't been over a million times. suffice it to say that his vast generalizations about the consensus among senior economists was not only a serious overstretch, but also, given the track records of those economists with regards the state of the world at this moment, not very tenable. i wouldn't rush to hold up the joint integrity of the academic economic and finance industry establishments, not with private debt having reached a staggering 303% of GDP under their thirty-year reign.
in fact, that the very existence of that debt, or the fact that borrowing, and the ease with which it could be effected, brought on this economic depression, seems to have missed planet money completely. that's what you think, anyway, listening to davidson chat with times reporter david duhigg (broadcast 05/15) about his book on credit card companies and their customers. i haven't read it, and i don't apologize for saying that i probably never will, but if duhigg wrote a fair and balanced account of the (to put it mildly) combative relationship between credit card issuers and their clients, that was not the book that he was selling on planet money. in a nutshell, he told davidson that unlimited and unfettered access to private information about a person's spending habits, both past and present, was necessary to extend credit as widely as possible. this widening of credit, duhigg claimed, was one of the strengths of the american economy. i am not making this shit up: listen to it yourself. forget the fact that anybody, and i mean ANYBODY, whose cojones are brass enough to argue that what america needs is easier access to credit--that americans can only benefit from having more debt--should have molten glass poured into every orifice in their body. we can all agree on that, i think. what is fucking revolting is listening to davidson eat every last bit of shit duhigg dumps on him, because you can HEAR the smile on his face while he does it. he never once, and i mean never, makes the very valid point that making it harder for people to get credit, i.e. ensuring that they have both the means to repay their debts and the restraint to accrue them conservatively, would be a very, very good thing, and might have saved us from the complete meltdown of our economic system (not to mention insidious journalistic memes, like 'green shoots').
i hope somebody puts ground glass into davidson's salad nicoise, or whatever the fuck he gets for lunch in midtown. there's enough brown-nosing to be had on any of the major networks, or in the print press, or in press conferences, or pretty much anywhere. but npr? if npr won't even politely call people on their bullshit, the fuck do we do?
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I've felt that way about Davidson from time to time, though I don't think I've ever fantasized about putting anything in his salad nicoise. Or any of his salads, for that matter.
ReplyDeleteAs I see it (or hear it, I guess), whenever the tone on Planet Money strays self-assuredly to the right, I've always assumed that comes from the insularity of financial and economic journalism more than anything truly ideological. Not that that excuses it--in fact, that might make it worse. But when Adam Davidson says something like, "I've never talked to another economist who believes families are that important" (I'm unfairly paraphrasing, but not that unfairly) or, as he said a few months back, "all economists regard free-trade to be unquestionably good," I think that that problem relates more to the diversity of his sample size than any hidden independent bias. Its like the White House press correspondents; maybe they eat up the shit of the sitting administration because they actually think it tastes good, but more likely than not, its because they're all too lazy or busy or uncreative to go out and taste something else.
Anyway, I heard both the shows your talking about and I feel you. Though I have to say, what frustrated me more about the Warren interview wasn't Davidson's rudeness per se. What bothered me much more was that they decided to broadcast this 15 minute near-screaming back and forth but never actually took the time to say anything specific. Davidson would say, "you're focus is too broad. you have too many pet issues." Warren would then turn around and say, "you can't separate these issues from the issue of finance." But they never actually stopped the interview and defined these terms. Sure, maybe "pet issue" is code for workers rights or home loan restructuring or whatever else, but I would have liked it if they had actually made that explicit. At least then the argument would have been interesting, if irritating for all the other reasons.
I also heard the credit card one. And aside from getting a kick out the Montreal angle, I think I only raised an eyebrow where you raised an axe. Who knows...maybe the rage just isn't in me. But apologist-y though he may have been, I don't think Duhigg was the 100% shill you paint him out to be. Maybe just 75% shill.
it makes me angry that in the middle of all of this, a guy from the new york times, whose book will have enormous publicity and, no doubt, extensive sales, is making the case to people who have a bad addiction to credit that they should regard that addiction as a good thing. what makes it worse is that, again, as a guy from the new york times, his word will be taken by many as being that of a well-informed and reasonable individual--just in the same way that right-wing economists could, without facing any real opposition, appear, at any time since reagan, and tell 'the public' that this one or that one of their dogmas was, in fact, sound, sensible policy, so that their status enabled them to sell ideology as science. duhigg is a drop in the bucket, sure, but it's a monstrous bucket, and, to be honest, america is drowning in it.
ReplyDeletei've read the same contention about davidson and financial journalism, and, while it's a perfectly reasonable explanation, it doesn't really satisfy me. if you were a good journalist to begin with, you'd approach your subjects and contacts with a healthy degree of skepticism. isn't that was 'objective' reporting is? davidson was stressing objectivity, and how he'd deviated from its norms, pretty strongly in his commentary on the warren explosion. if davidson allows himself to be co-opted so easily, then he's just a bad journalist, and planet money should send him packing. if they do, he should look me up. i have a salad for him to try.
I absolutely agree with you about Davidson. And I really wasn't defending him as a journalist. In fact, the point I was trying to make was that, to me, he didn't sound so much like a partisan-hack as a lazy or incurious or completely insulated journalist. A journalist-hack, if you will. One isn't really an improvement over the other; its just a difference that I thought to point out.
ReplyDeleteI still like listening to Planet Money though, and the three-fourths of the time where isn't being so condescendingly sure of his own right-center bias, or at least, when he's not wearing it on his sleeve, I even like listening to him. He generally comes up with pretty good stories. But I agree with you.