The Ultimate Beat Sweetener: The 31 Year Old “Dismantling G.M.”

The New York Times had a piece up over the weekend about Brian Deese, a 31-year-old law school student (on break, apparently) who according to their headline is “in charge of dismantling G.M.”

This story caught on, as just about any section-front story from the NYT seems likely to do.  I’ve seen it linked copiously (and I’ve done it myself), and it’s currently the top e-mailed and blogged story in the business section at NYTimes.com.

But here’s my question: Can they prove their headline?

The story includes a quote from Steven Rattner, “one of the leaders of President Obama’s automotive task force,” about Deese’s grad-school beard.  It has a quote from Larry Summers about his intelligence.  It cites “several people who were present for the debate” as saying that Deese spoke out against liquidation for Chrysler, and says he wrote a very persuasive memo about the bad that Chapter 7 could cause.  But the only one who seems to say that Deese was ever the guy in charge of the taskforce is Deese.  In fact, the White House doesn’t list Deese as a member of the Auto Task Force at all.  He’s listed as an economic adviser to the president at the White House Web site, but there’s no more formal designation that I can find.  So to say he’s running it is a pretty substantial leap.

And the Times seems to get that, but much further down in its story:

Every time Mr. Deese ran the numbers on G.M. and Chrysler, he came back with the now-obvious conclusion that neither was a viable business, and that their plans to revive themselves did not address the erosion of their revenues. But it took the support of Mr. Rattner and Ron Bloom, senior advisers to the task force charged with restructuring the automobile industry, to help turn Mr. Deese’s positions into policy.

Normally, I kind of enjoy mindless profiles of major Washington players — they’re what Matthew Yglesias calls beat-sweeteners, pieces journalists write both to inform the public and to make their own jobs easier.  But this one seems particularly damaging, as it implies that the administration is leaving some very big decisions in the hands of a guy whose total automotive industry experience is apparently sleeping in the parking lot of a G.M. plant on his way to volunteer for the Obama campaign.

I’m wondering whether I could get a few friendly quotes dropped into the paper and turn myself into the point girl on, say, Health Care or NASA or something.  Who wants to try?

Could a Blog have Saved Edmund Andrews from Foreclosure?

About two weeks ago, the New York Times ran an excerpt from Edmund Andrews’s forthcoming book, Busted: Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown.  I wasn’t alone in saying it would be the weekend’s must-read; Andrews’s tale of how he, a successful business writer for the Times, and his new wife were facing foreclosure makes for a fascinating read.  It’s a very personal story:

^{Image by: Respres (Flickr)}

The panic attack hit me around 2 a.m. on Patty’s birthday. It was Oct. 17, 2007, and I was lying in bed obsessing over bills that couldn’t be postponed and the money we didn’t have to pay them. Like many of my predawn fear cascades, this one had its start with a specific unpaid bill: $240 in traffic tickets — $140 for speeding, $50 each for expired tags and inspection. The fines would double if we didn’t pay them in less than a week. The tickets had uncorked the bottle on all the other “must pays”: the $400 electric bill with the cutoff date printed in red; the $220 cable/telephone/Internet bill for the past two months; the MasterCard and American Express bills — at least one of which had to be brought current or I wouldn’t even be able to travel for work. And of course, there was the $3,271 mortgage payment.

After its publication, Megan McArdle at The Atlantic found that Andrews neglected to mention in his piece or his book that his new wife filed for bankruptcy just after they first married — and had also filed once before, during her first marriage, making her not exactly the kind of good-credit help-mate that one might think she is from Andrews’s descriptions.  McArdle:

Andrews’ desire to shield his wife is understandable–hell, laudable.  No decent person wants to parade their spouse’s financial trouble in front of the world.  But this is material information that changes the tenor of his story.  Serial bankruptcy is not a creation of the current credit crisis, and it doesn’t just happen to anyone, particularly anyone with a six figure salary.

While I agree with her conclusions, I also agree with Andrews’s response that it’s not terribly material to the story he was trying to tell, about the ease with which he — clearly unqualified — got massive loans and credit he couldn’t afford.

But what I find even more interesting was a piece McArdle wrote that same morning, about Credit Reports and whether black marks “have staying power.”  She writes:

On the other hand, I can attest from personal experience that those smudges have staying power.  Through a series of bizarre events including a misfiled state tax return, multi-state residence, and an apparently incorrect address, the state of New York slapped me with a tax lien a few years back.  The State of New York has since admitted they were entirely in error, and indeed, that they owed me about $500 in refund.

(Not that they paid.   Funnily enough, the statute of limitations for getting a refund from the state is much shorter than their statute of limitations for coming after arrears.)

Megan McArdle is the Business and Economics Editor for The Atlantic, as well as one of its leading business bloggers.  Just in replying to the day’s news, above, she brought in her own personal experience — instant connect between what’s happened to her and what’s happening in the world.

Edmund Andrews, as an economics reporter for the NYT, says, “I have been the paper’s chief eyes and ears on the Federal Reserve for the past six years.”  Yet Andrews was able to disconnect himself so completely from what he was writing about that he fell into a terrible trap despite being so well informed.

If in 2004, Edmund Andrews had been blogging for DealBook at the Times in addition to supplying objective reports on the “spike in go-go mortgages,” maybe he would have been forced to realize what was coming for him.  Maybe one day he would have posted, “My wife and I are thinking about buying a $500,000 house –” and would have had to stop right there, hit in print by the impossibility of that ever working out.  And, I guarantee, if just writing it wasn’t enough to shake him into reality, the fiery comments that would have followed would have offered at least 75 persuasive descriptions of what he could do with that idea.

This thing we do, blogging — it’s in first person for a reason.  To do it well requires an amount of honesty that often leads to self-awareness, whether through realization or through readers forcing it upon you.

I’m continually bothered by the way that we cheer for distance between reporters and what they report on.  I understand the desire for objectivity, but not the belief that it’s possible.