Three Big Stories, Three Media Disappearing Acts
Have you heard about the $80.7 billion “reorganization gain” General Motors posted in its recent release of financial information?
I’ll bet not. Specifically, that gargantuan sum is the positive portion of a net amount of $79.672 billion that “old General Motors” — now known as Motors Liquidation Company — recognized as “special items” during the first nine days of July. You read that right.
To reach the details of this most extraordinary gain, the company forces you to download and open a 14-page Word document; I guess the news about that marvelous invention known as Portable Document Format (PDF) has yet to reach Detroit. Finally, the reader sees the line-by-line treatment on page 6:
Allow me to translate:
- After writing off $53.639 billion in “loans,” the federal government has a majority stake in “new” General Motors supposedly valued at $2.505 billion. The difference of $51.134 billion represents the direct amount U.S. taxpayers have lost thus far as a result of bailing the company out.
- The third item is the total of the debts and other general obligations the bankruptcy court in essence allowed GM to walk away from.
This astounding and precedent-breaking set of transactions is news by any reasonable definition of the word. At first, the Associated Press treated it that way. Relatively brief versions of AP reports issued during the first hour or so after GM’s early morning November 16 release noted the $80 billion pickup (pun not intended). But by 9:30, the $80 billion disappeared and never returned; it is nowhere to be found in the final version of the wire service’s coverage. The focus in later revisions moved to further discussion of the “new” GM’s reported “managerial net loss” of $1.2 billion and to the company’s intention to begin repaying some of the additional money that Uncle Sam lent to it after it emerged from bankruptcy. To be clear (which AP wasn’t), the loans targeted for payback are over and above the $50-plus billion already written off.
Although it doesn’t involve huge sums of money, a second recent establishment media disappearing act involves hundreds of thousands of Americans who have always received prominent mention in the run-up to Thanksgiving whenever Republicans have occupied the White House. I am of course referring to the homeless.
Here’s a big story . . . The unemployment rate fell to 10 percent in November as employers cut the smallest number of jobs since the recession began.
Outrageous! Let’s see the birth certificates of everyone involved! It’s proof that Obama is merely improving the economy so he can lull us into a state of false confidence so he can destroy it for real later! It’s just cover so Geitner can resign without blame! It’s Michelle Obama’s way of distracting attention from her highly toned biceps! It’s just the Left’s way of taking attention away from Sarah Palin’s jet . . . BUS! BUS tour. It’s a way to heat up the earth with high expectations of a better future in order to distract from Climategate emails. It’s just something liberals use to make conservatives’ heads explode.
“But if they can successfully hide $80 billion, ignore hundreds of thousands of homeless, make the Christmas shopping season disappear, and pretend that Christmas retail business really isn’t that bad, I wouldn’t bet against them on Climategate just yet.”
I agree 100% with your last paragraph. Let’s hope that the elections of 2010 show that the public does know how bad things are even if the politicians and big media don’t.
President Obama said he noted the trend of good news for his administration.
September 2009-
Does that sound like a bail out for the media in our future?
Billions of dollars to keep the Happy Days of Obamas Media Propaganda?
MERRY MEDIA CHRISTMAS
@1. Now and Then: – The unemployment rate fell to 10 percent in November as employers cut the smallest number of jobs since the recession began.
LOL! Stupid to the last. Try reading that line again, numbnutz.
Unemployment can’t fall due to employers cutting ‘fewer’ jobs. If employers are still cutting jobs – at whatever rate – the only way unemployment can fall is if people drop off the unemployment rolls because they’ve either exhausted their benefits, given in and taken early retirement in the face of no new jobs, taken a low-paying part-time job or otherwise quit looking for gainful employment (and are therefore no longer qualified for benefits). Oh… and there’s that ‘seasonal adjustment’. Heh. What a fool.
That didn’t happen. A Google News search I did on November 29 on “homelessness rising” (not in quotes) returned all of 22 unique listings. I repeated that search on December 2 and got the same results. As far as I could tell, none of the listings were from national establishment media sources and virtually none of them addressed overall national or local trends. Similar searches done two or more years ago while George W. Bush was president would certainly have retrieved far more results.
How hilariously stupid. How about googling “homelessness”.
http://news.google.com/nwshp?hl=en&tab=wn&q=%22homelessness%22
That’s over four thousand entries a great many of which deal with the escalating homeless rate, and some EVEN DEAL WITH THE RISING HOMELESSNESS RATE AMONG VETERANS. You don’t even offer any way of knowing that there’s an increase. The idea of picking an overly specific phrase, googling it and then claiming that there is thus nothing published on the issue can only work if your audience is retarded. Just read this article from USA TOday:
http://www.usatoday.com/news/military/2009-11-24-veterans-court_N.htm
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/1/02/AR2009120201250.html
Indeed, one of the most undercovered story on PJM is the rising number of homeless veterans. Why were there no stories about homeless veterans on Veteran’s Day?
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/11/11/on-holiday-considering-the-plight-of-homeless-veterans/?scp=1&sq=homeless%20veterans&st=cse
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/11/opinion/11wed4.html?_r=1&scp=2&sq=homeless%20veterans&st=cse
About one-third of all adult homeless men are veterans, and an average night finds an estimated 131,000 of them from five decades bedding down on streets and in charity sanctuaries. About 3 in 100 of them are back from Iraq and Afghanistan. The problem of homelessness for Vietnam veterans is, shamefully, well known. But the men and women in this growing cohort took just 18 months to find rock bottom, compared with the five years-plus of the previous generation’s veterans.
Just another traitor!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eric-burns/if-i-still-worked-at-fox_b_376972.html
Has anyone checked the metadata on that Word document? Might be interesting if they didn’t “clean” it before publication.
A few other disappearing acts: How about Climategate? How about the ACORN scandal? How about unemployment? How about Obama’s plummeting approval numbers? The list goes on and on, but the mainstream media will simply not reporting anything negative about their king.
Bill won.
Now that you mention it, around here the “Homeless Family on Thanksgiving Day” stories were scarce this year, unlike holiday seasons in times of Republican presidential incumbency.
Did others notice the same?
9. Dred
Gimme your number. I’ll call and tell you where you’re wrong.
Got any more dishonest paranoid rubbish you want to share? Oh spare me this theocon garbage about how all you holier than the rest of us are crying in pain that people are saying “Happy Holidays” instead of “Merry Xmas”. Well guess what, that is called marketing you know nothing. Because there is Kwaanza, Hannukah and even New Years gifts they are trying to sell, so “Happy Holidays” is generic. Sorry but being Jewish this kind of redneck brain flatulences sbout the war on xmas really falls on deaf ears. Try acting Christian instead of finding petty trivia to whine about.
4 goy . . .
You sound just like the fat lady singing. Now about those invoices.
goy = Maxine Waters
I don’t get it. For years now I’ve been hearing Glenn Reynolds and the like rhapsodize about our new era, where technology has leveled the playing field, the blogosphere is as powerful as any other media form, that “citizen journalists” are as important as any other kind, etc.
Yet in practice, columns like this one — linked by Reynolds himself — still treat the “media” as if it’s a distinct force, as if what it does actually IS more important. I don’t get it. Either the playing field has been leveled, and we now have a vast variety of news providers all of equal merit; or the “MSM” truly is still more worthy of our attention.
Which is it? I’m seriously asking. Are “citizen journalists” the equal of “professional journalists,” or not? And if they are, why does it matter WHICH journalists are covering which stories, so long as they’re all getting covered somewhere?
You msut be mistaken. I live in Detroit, so we got huge coverage of the GM guarantees, and we were solemnly assured by the government and GM itself that these were just loans and would be entirely paid back–thus everybody would win.
Now that you mention it, around here the “Homeless Family on Thanksgiving Day” stories were scarce this year, unlike holiday seasons in times of Republican presidential incumbency.
Did others notice the same?
That’s because they were too busy running stories about people with health insurance problems to promote the Dems’ agenda.
Today they’ll be trumpeting the “good” news about the unemployment rate dropping slightly to “only” 10%.
October 2009’s unemployment rate of 10.2% was 5.5% higher than October 2007’s 4.7%.
It’s actually worse than that–10.2% is 217% higher than 4.7%. It’s a fairly common arithmetic error that media and politicians abuse to disguise the real rate of change to influence public opinion (example: claiming a rise in income tax from 3% to 6% is a “3% increase” when the rate actually doubled).
Since 217% makes your point better than 5.5%, I assume this was an honest mistake.
About one-third of all adult homeless men are veterans, and an average night finds an estimated 131,000 of them from five decades bedding down on streets and in charity sanctuaries.
How did you learn that ? Did the reporter check their DD 214s ? Of course not. I have been warning my medical students that about a third of the male patients in LA County Hospital will claim to be Vietnam veterans. Most of those men would have been under 15 years old at the time the US troops left the country. There is nothing new under the sun, including credulous reporters.
Here’s a big story . . . The unemployment rate fell to 10 percent in November as employers cut the smallest number of jobs since the recession began.
This reminds me of the way the Soviet Union used to “adjust” figures to show major increases in production, increases in lifespan, increases in worker efficiency, etc., even as the country fell apart economically. How can more people lose work and the unemployment rate go down? Are Democrats trying to revive the infamous 3/5 of a person concept, where the unemployed instead of blacks are counted as a 3/5 person?
Or perhaps the Obama Administration is trying its own hand at creating an unemployment version of the now-discredited global warming hockey stick graph. The temperature may be dropping and unemployment growing, but with with some creative work global warming can be proven and unemployment rate can be shown to be falling. Phil Jones and Michael Mann, please call your offices – the Obama Administration is seeking your advice about data handling techniques.
And they ignore the growing http://www.DumpChrisDodd.com movement.
Were it not for the lack of interest by MSM, our Founder would have gone to prison – http://www.FATBOY.cc
So the government should be proud of “only” 10% unemployment?
Try being one of the 10% for a year, and then crow how great 10% is. Add to that number the people who’s benefits have run out & still don’t have work, add to that the underemployed and it’s more like 18%, that’s a lot closer to one-in-five Americans going into poverty! Those “Cloward – Piven” chickens have come home to roost.
We’re in deep yogurt people, and the people who keep telling you that the poop on the bottom of your shoe is ice cream, are a significant part of the problem; it is in our best interests to treat them as the problem children they are.
Isn’t it illustrative how the “progressive” “liberal” Left make Americas’ transition to third world status sound like so much fun, & righteous too!!!
“Liberals” look forward to Socialized Medicine, “Tax & Steal” and Amnesty, like the clinically insane looking forward to driving off a cliff just to see what happens.
Soon, we won’t have to wonder what 1932 was like, hell, with any luck, we’ll find out what 1775 was like, if that’s any consolation.
If employers are still cutting jobs – at whatever rate – the only way unemployment can fall is if people drop off the unemployment rolls because they’ve either exhausted their benefits, given in and taken early retirement in the face of no new jobs, taken a low-paying part-time job or otherwise quit looking for gainful employment (and are therefore no longer qualified for benefits). Oh… and there’s that ’seasonal adjustment’.
You’ve really got that wrong, Goy. I’ll try to put this in non-economic terms so that you find it easier to understand. If you’re driving at a constant rate of speed, say 60 miles an hour, and you let your foot off the gas, your rate of speed will decrease. Even if you are going 58 miles an hour now, you are going slower.
The same with the unemployment rate. What you fail to understand is that every month, people exhaust their benefits or leave unemployment for other reasons. Without MORE jobless people, the rate falls, just as without constant pressure on the gas, so does your rate of speed in a car. If there are fewer jobless people to replenish those falling off the rolls, then the unemployment rate will decrease. That is if it is a product of only counting people on getting unemployment. I happen to think that’s not a very good way of capturing the true unemployment rate, and that any given time it is actually higher because people who fall of the rolls do not necessarily find work, but turn to other social service or indeed, enter the informal economy.
I do agree with your other point, however. One must wonder what the writing was thinking when he boasted of googling such a specific phrase. Its proof of nothing except that the author was looking and hoping to find a preferred outcome to his search.
Tom:
I think your figures are in error (though it doesn’t change your larger points). Specifically, the “net amount” to which you refer is not $79.672 billion. Instead what you call the “positive portion” ($80.7 billion) is really the net amount. The “positive portion” is $83.506 billion.
To say it otherwise, the total gain reported is $83.506 billion, the total loss is $2.786 billion, and the net gain is $80.720 billion.
Thanks for digging into this. Cheers!
TPD: “I don’t get it”
No, you don’t. Here’s a clue: try something other than a strawman argument.
Unless, of course, you’re just another corrupt libtard pretending he didn’t understand what Ryenolds really said.
#26, the “net amount” of $79.762 billion is specifically listed on GM’s linked release. It includes other items besides the reorg.
#18, you make a good point. I should have said that 10.2% is 5.5 “percentage points” or “points” higher than 4.7%. As to the math, 10.2% is “only” 117% higher than 4.7%.
#5 Goy, if you search Google News for homelessness between Nov. 24-28, you will only get 516 unique items (the header says almost 4,000, but that includes duplicates, which is why my link is to the last page of the search result).
Virtually all of them are localized. Almost none of them talk about the impact of the national economy on homelessness, which is almost certainly on the rise and would be at least theorized to be such by major national establishment media outlets if a Republican were in the White House. They’ve done it in the past when the economy was demonstrably better.
I have a thought why retail sales may be down over and above the 10.5%+ unemployment rate. By taking Christmas out the text this holiday loses it’s meaning. What I mean is their was a time when Christmas was embraced for the meaning and a gift was an extension of God’s spirt and reason of celebration. Lessening it to a “holiday” and with constant sales ads and buy,buy,buy two months before the actual day losses the magic Christmas once gave America. Damn shame!
A Westlaw check shows that there have actually been more stories about “homeless!” and “thanksgiving” this November than there were last November, which had been the previous record.
But what’s interesting is that the stories may be less prominent and less dour this year. For example, the NYT ran 9 stories this year that met the search criteria, but the most prominent placement was on p. A17, and the most troubling title was “For Her, the Long and Winding Road Led to the Street.”
Last year in November it ran 11 stories, including “In Downturn, Charities Face Needs of Their Own, which made page 1.
In 2007, “Amid Affluence, the Hidden Homeless” was run on page 1.
In 2006, “From Projects To Penthouse, It’s One Family” also made page 1.
I didn’t see any particularly relevant stories in 2004-05.
Goy, if you search Google News for homelessness between Nov. 24-28, you will only get 516 unique items
um…doesn’t that mean your point was bs to begin with?
23. Constitution First:
It’s a recession when your neighbor loses his job;
it’s a depression when you lose yours.
Harry S. Truman
23. Constitution First:
don’t waste your bandwidth.
You can never explain unemployment to someone living off the government dole.
24 Nigel Lawry
I appreciate you taking the time to correct goy. I’ve long since stopped correcting him, given his refusal to admit his mistakes (how Republican of him).Ii suggest you send him an invoice for your educating him. I did . . . still waiting. I think he’s waiting to find a way to blame Barney Frank for his welching.
Dred? Number?
Here’s a big story . . . The unemployment rate fell to 10 percent in November as employers cut the smallest number of jobs since the recession began.
Outrageous! Let’s see the birth certificates of everyone involved! It’s proof that Obama is merely improving the economy
If that’s the Democrats idea of “improving the economy”, God help us all!
“It’s just something liberals use to make conservatives’ heads explode.”
Conservatives’ heads don’t tend to explode or implode like liberals. Their heads, unlike Now and Then’s, tend to be filled with brains and knowledge gotten from the real world.
#31, Um, No. It proves my point.
A Google News Archive search on the analogous dates before and after Thanksgiving two years ago came back with 258 items. Given that the large majority of news content has been locked up or expired in the interim, that means that a similar search done contemporaneously would have come back with thousands of results. That’s a lot more than 516.
If you look at the 2007 result, you’ll see the NYT telling us that “housing market troubles hit homeless too” and other nationally focused stories. This year, the Times had no such analogous story, even though the economy is far, far worse.
It’s just not as important to cover the homeless when a Dem is president. QED.
You can throw up a white flag any time now.
First things first.
This sentence makes no sense:
Given that the large majority of news content has been locked up or expired in the interim, that means that a similar search done contemporaneously would have come back with thousands of results.
I don’t see how you get from A to B. There is no process or system in what you’ve written to get from 258 to “thousands”. Nonsense.
And again, you set your search terms as narrowly as possible in the first place “homelessness rising” and claimed that for the topic of homelessness you only captured 22 hits. That is the shoddiest sort of research that I’ve ever seen and borders on mendacity. No wait, it is mendacity. You’d certainly get an F on a Freshman term paper for pulling such a stunt.
Most importantly, no where have you actually shown that homelessness is greater. You’ve not accessed any databases or studies. You are assuming that it should be greater, but it does not necessarily follow. You simply want it to be so, and are either too lazy or too ignorant to find your way to the proper evidence.
I’m not the first or last person here to correct you; even people predisposed to your point of view have pointed out your mistakes. Your work is shoddy, and your reasoning addled. It may be good enough for the semi-literate fools who frequent your blog, but if you want to actually try to convince people not predisposed to your ideas, try arguing honestly. And if not, get someone to write this who can actually pull off the kind of sophistry you’re attempting. White flag…that has to be the most hilarious thing I’ve seen all week.
#37, I note no attempt to comment on the nature of the 2007 v. 2009 reporting, and no reasonable attempt to otherwise refute my contentions.
You don’t seem to understand how to get from point A to B on something that is totally obvious to anyone who understand how Internet news availability works.
I don’t have to show homelessness is greater, though it probably is. What someone who wants to justify the establishment media’s relative non-coverage of the homeless in 2009 vs. 2007 would have to claim is that homelessness has steeply declined, even though unemployment has more than doubled and foreclosures are at or near multi-decade highs. Yeah, right.
Thus, I consider your previous comment the equivalent of a white flag, accompanied by the usual name-calling and immature childishness.
32. …and it’s a recovery when Barrack Obama loses his! Huckabee 2012!
This is just ONE of the HIDDEN stories. What is it about the Obamanation and his media ars* lickers that they just love to HIDE things.WHERES THE BIRTH CERTIFICATE KENYAN
Think GREEN
Think SCAMMERS
Think FRAUD
Think NAZIS
Think gullible, hysterical , naive MOONBATS
Think evil power hungry POLITICIANS
Think LUDDITES
Think COMMUNISTS
Think anti CAPITALISTS
Think DEMS
Think OBAMBI
Think PRISON for FRAUD and LIES
Think ‘HIDE THE DECLINE’
Think ‘MANIPULATE’
Think ‘TRICK’
Think NATURAL phenomenon of CLIMATE CHANGE
Think CO2 is NOT a pollutant but a VITAL part of the cycle of LIFE
Think MORE CO2 more FOOD less CO2 LESS food
Think Green NAZIS and their gullible blind supporters are therefore ANTI LIFE
GM made junk, while their CEO laughed all the way to the bank.
I’ll never buy one ever again.
Think Maoist in BOs cabinate
Think Eliminate 90% of humans person in his cabinet
Think A terrorist his best friend
Think A raving Anti American as his church
Think Chicago political machine
Think Global Government advocate in his cabinet
Think no real qualification for office (BO)
Think dead Heros vomiting in their graves at a US President bowing low to foreign leaders.
Think whos next to bethrown under the bus.
Think what America will do when this radical leftist agenda is accelerated because the 2010 election will take the legislature control from his cohorts and fellow travelers.
Tom Blumer. Your dishonesty masks a man out of his depth. Had you really wanted to get to the bottom of media reporting of 2007 vs. 2009, you would have used a Lexis Nexis search. We both know that; your song and dance to maintain some kind of legitimacy when you obviously deserve none is pathetic. I’ve never seen a serious individual use google news to do a media analysis and expect to be taken seriously.
You’re pulling rank here and trying to intimidate. But your failure at reason is so obvious its just ludicrous for you to try. For there to be a one to one relationship in the comparison that you’re making, you would have had to do the same search in 2007. You didn’t then and you can’t do it now; google news goes back only one year.
You said:
Given the obviously worse and still deteriorating employment and housing situations, one would think that to the extent the homeless problem is truly serious, it has almost certainly gotten worse overall, and definitely so in certain parts of the country. One might therefore conclude that homelessness would have received more media coverage just before and after this year’s Thanksgiving than it has in previous years, and that enterprising reporters would have rushed out of their comfortable offices to breathlessly tell their audiences how awful the plight of the homeless has become.
As I said, and your own text shows, your point is based on the dubious assumption that homelessness has gotten worse this year. Therefore, you claim, there should be more reporting. I showed you that there was significantly more reporting in 2009 and you admitted it, which is when you began this pathetic squirreling.
You said:
you will only get 516 unique items (the header says almost 4,000, but that includes duplicates, which is why my link is to the last page of the search result).Virtually all of them are localized. Almost none of them talk about the impact of the national economy on homelessness, which is almost certainly on the rise and would be at least theorized to be such by major national establishment media outlets if a Republican were in the White House.
Apparently, on top of it, you are claiming to have read all of the five hundred or so articles.
By any measure, this is simply pathetic. To be caught lying and then to be intellectually outclassed on your own blog site, that’s just sad. Your throwing up the white flag bs was simply the funniest part; you’re actually relying on the stupidity of your own readership to not see through such lame attempts. Its a commentary that reflects equally on your skills and on the audience they’ve attracted.
40. Pragmatist:
You forgot one: THINK family values.
#43, I’ve redone other Google News searches originally done in 2007 in Google News’s Archives, and found reductions in the number of results returned of 85%-90% from the originals.
Applying that result to the search in question, that would mean that if I had done the search indicated contemporaneously in 2007, I would have obtained between 1,720 and 2,580 items (258 divided by .15 and .10, respectively). That’s between triple and quintuple the 2009 count of 516 unique items. The midpoint is 2,150 (i.e., “thousands”).
Now you have two comments that are the equivalents of white flags, accompanied by more of the usual name-calling, gratuitous insults, and immature childishness. Thanks for the support. :–>
You’re the one who is either having a couple of off days, or is in wayyyyy over his/her head.
Tom, there is a point where someone must simply admit they’re wrong. Your other points had some debatable merit, but your point on homelessness was simply a bad idea, that you’ve simply taken too far now. The idea wasn’t very sound to begin with and your methodology was at best based on hope, rather than reason. Goy is being an ass about it–and he completely and arrogantly shot down another poster who made a legitimate point–but each defense you provide only shows how badly thought out your point was on that issue.
#46 Nigel, I disagree.
Short of having a time machine, #44, though done after the fact, puts your concerns away quantitatively.
Anyone who thinks that the networks or papers of record did anywhere near as much with homelessness this year as they did in 2007 (they should have done at least as much or more, given the objectively far worse economy), is welcome to attempt to pile up convincing evidence. I doubt they can.
Oops, meant #45. Now that is a real mistake.
Tom, you had a chance to maintain some sort of integrity and instead squandered it.
#49, The facts stand quantitatively and the observations stand qualitatively until shown otherwise. Sorry you don’t see it that way, and it really doesn’t matter if you do or not.
Whoa. I don’t even care about this anymore. The guy lied; like he isn’t lying three quarters of the time anyway. But this…Blumer is a complete Douche.
As the immaturity without substance continues ….
Attn. Goy:
In #43, you referred to “the dubious assumption that homelessness has gotten worse this year.”
Dubious, schmubious — here’s the Washington Post, December 6, confirming the obvious, in an article where the authors advocate returning to pre-1996 welfare as we used to know it:
According to the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty, the number of homeless Americans is up by 61 percent since the recession began in December 2007.
Imagine that.
You’ve been factually, quantitatively, and qualitatively refuted. I’m still expecting the white flags, pal. I was right, you were wrong. Period.