Housing

Fall behind on your mortgage? These days it's anyone's fault but your own according to the mainstream media. The March 9 "CBS Evening News" found another way to fault home lenders instead of one borrower who took on an ill-planned mortgage that was more than he could pay: the race card. "[Michael] Wiggins, a city bus driver, was one of millions of Americans caught in the subprime mortgage…

Yours truly had a memorable series of exchanges with MarketWatch Washington Bureau Chief Rex Nutting roughly 18 months ago. At one point, he appeared to reveal an expectation (otherwise, why provide a graph of it?) that home prices might actually fall like the NASDAQ did from 2000-2002 -- which, for the record, was almost 78%, from a peak of 5048 in March 2000 to a trough of 1114 in October…

.... for what I believe is a painfully obvious reason. It is reports like the one written up by Shobhana Chandra at Bloomberg yesterday on household net worth that make you wonder if everyday US citizens will ever get the information needed to accurately evaluate what's going on in the economy without doing more digging than they have time for -- or that they should even have to do. Chandra's…

Delivering a ridiculous level of vacuous hyperbole, Thursday's CBS Evening News greeted reports of a 0.83 percent 4th quarter foreclosure rate with just under 6 percent of mortgages more than a month past due as proof “the American dream” is “slipping away” since “foreclosures are spreading like cancer.” Those may indeed be unusually high levels, but the American dream is hardly “slipping away”…

On Wednesday, Associated Press Business Writer J.W. Elphinstone used a curious definition of "narrow" to emphasize the importance of a home-price measurement index that only looks at the country's largest metro areas, while minimizing the significance of one that catalogs virtually the entire USA -- all apparently done to create an overwrought portrayal of home values as being "in freefall."…

BMI Vice President Dan Gainor took to the Fox Business Network Thursday to explain the difference between "depression," "recession" and "slow growth," terms the mainstream media has blurred.Economists "don't even agree that we're in a recession yet," Gainor said. "But then if you watch the network news shows, we're already up to eight times this year - that's once a week where they've made a…

For years, NewsBusters and the Business and Media Institute have informed readers about how the press, since George W. Bush was first elected, have tried to create a self-fulfilling prophecy by misrepresenting economic data in as negative a way as possible.This is likely the cause of the public's continued pessimism about economic conditions even as the economy has expanded for 25 consecutive…

Perhaps the average New York Times reader makes $250,000 a year, but the average American family? Not quite.And yet the Times, and its media colleagues, continue to feature sob stories from rich families in stories supposed to illustrate the pain the housing “crisis” is causing for middle- and lower-income families. “Not since the Depression has a larger share of Americans owed more on their…

Granted, the National Association of Realtors (NAR) is a trade organization which will, as trade organizations do, try to put the best face on a bad situation. And granted, part of the press's job is to filter through hype and false sunniness to report the truth of what's really going on. But that is most emphatically not what the Associated Press did with yesterday's NAR report on the state of…

Just when you thought the economic doom and gloom couldn't get any worse in the news, "Good Morning America" has determined recession is now causing arson. "We have news this morning on the home foreclosure front, word that cash-strapped homeowners are taking desperate measures," ABC co-host Diane Sawyer said. The February 11 "GMA" has determined "cash-strapped homeowners" are taking "…

In a class-warfare driven media, where the "haves" are often pitted against "have-nots," you would think an outgoing CEO giving up $37.5 million in pay would be celebrated. Not quite. CNN's "American Morning" didn't think it was quite good enough when Countrywide Financial's Angelo Mozilo forfeited $37.5 million in severance pay because he said he felt it was the "right thing to do." "It's…

It's really frightening to imagine that people who get the bulk of their news from Comedy Central's "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart" will be making what they probably think are educated decisions at the ballot box come Election Day. Stewart, who is now a self-proclaimed economist, said on his January 23 show, "Our economy is tanking." And now you can add financial media critic to Stewart's…