My First "Lammbaste" - Having It Both Ways (or A Tale of Red Journalism)

When I started telling people about my plans to write a blog, my buddies Sylvia Groves and Brendan Sheehan suggested that from time to time I include a "Lammbaste."  So here goes.

A few days ago, The Wall Street Journal had a story on the first page entitled "SEC's Hunt for Crisis-Era Wrongdoing Loses Steam".  The story concerned the SEC's decision not to pursue a case against a hedge fund that the Journal says created some of the mortgage-backed securities that led to the financial crisis.  In effect, the story says that the SEC is giving up the fight on hedge funds' role in causing the crisis.  

However, further back in the same day's paper, the Journal ran another story about a major joint SEC/DOJ action against Bank of America relating to - you guessed it - MBS deals.  The story also noted that UBS had just settled a claim concerning collateralized debt obligations, another culprit in causing the financial crisis.  So perhaps the hunt for crisis-era wrongdoing is not losing steam after all, but you wouldn't know that from the headline on page 1.

I have been noticing that, over time, the Journal has increasingly reflected the slightly-to-the-right-of-Attila-the-Hun editorial policy of its current owner, Rupert Murdoch.  That's fine when it's limited to the editorial pages (actually, it's not fine, but I can - and frequently do - skip those pages so as to avoid a major attack of indigestion).  But when the editorial policy seeps into what purports to be news, that's another story.  And the placement of these two stories, with the troubling headline on the far more prominent one, is typical of how the Journal slants the news to make regulators, including good and earnest people at the SEC (and by implication the Obama administration), look bad.

And then on Tuesday, the Journal ran a story with the headline "The Other Targeting Scandal" concerning an alleged plot by the Democrats to get the SEC to "discourage public companies from supporting independent organizations, while applying no such regulation to labor unions" (which are, of course, more liberal).  

Aside from the fact that the allegations are being made by that paragon of investigative integrity, Darrell Issa, the story has so many errors in it that I don't know where to begin.  The underlying issue is whether the SEC should require disclosure of political contributions and, possibly, other political-related expenses (such as lobbying expenses).  While I'm personally opposed to imposing a requirement in this area, there continues to be lots of healthy discussion on the point - and many companies have voluntarily made robust disclosure of these expenses.  And, for the information of the writer of the story, with extremely limited exceptions, labor unions are not subject to the type of disclosure referred to in the story.  For the many people who only know what they read in the paper, this story is misleading, to put it mildly.

I'd like to coin the term "red journalism" (as in "red state," not red as in the commie-pinkos whose interests the Journal seems to think the SEC is supporting).  Where is Edward R. Murrow when you need him?