CCJ Traveling Curriculum trainer and contributing writer Tracy Thompson is a former Washington Post and Atlanta Journal Constitution reporter and the author of two books:  The Beast: A Journey Through Depression and The Ghost in the House: Motherhood, Raising Children, and Struggling with Depression. She blogs regularly here.
 

Ralph McGill, a famous editor of the Atlanta Constitution back in the 1960s, had a one-sentence formula for writing about complicated subjects: “You have to put the hay down where the mules can get at it.”

Folksy metaphors seem wholly inadequate to deal with recent events on Wall Street, though. In the past week, things have moved so fast that reporters were hard-pressed to even locate the hay, much less distribute it to us, the mules. Last Monday, as I left for the bus stop to meet my 7-year-old after school, the House was debating the bail-out plan. By the time we made it back to the house, the House had unexpectedly rejected the plan, and stock markets around the world were taking a swan dive. After a solid week of fast-breaking news, I noticed one or two of the regular news people I depend on were missing from their usual posts, and I thought: darn right – I bet they had to go home and crash. I wanted to crash, too – or maybe just plug my fingers in my ears and chant “LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOU.” Brother, can you spare some earplugs?

But there’s nothing like a financial disaster to spark your interest in financial news, even when you are a financial moron like me. I’ve been avidly reading the business pages and listening to NPR’s “Marketplace” for about a year now, ever since it became evident even to us dullards that the economy was going off a cliff. I’ve seen a lot of very sophisticated reporting, obviously produced for the business community. I think I understood maybe half of it. A thoughtful critique of the recent performance of the nation’s business press from somebody who understands all of it can be found in this month’s Columbia Journalism Review, in which Dean Starkman argues that in focusing on the numbers, reporters have missed “the crooked heart of the credit crisis” – i.e., greed. (An outstanding exception to this, which Starkman notes, is a segment of Ira Glass’ radio show, “This American Life,” that ran last May, entitled “The Giant Pool of Money.” It followed a trail from a black-tie dinner for Wall Street financiers down to a tearful former Marine who had to loot his son’s college fund to make the mortgage payment. It was so mesmerizing I stopped doing my chores on a Saturday afternoon to sit down and listen to it. More recently, there’s been a slew of human interest reporting about the crisis – stories of families struggling to stay afloat, exposes of mortgage-fraud schemes, dire tales of foreclosures.

What has been largely missing, though, have been stories that ask the most basic, urgent question of certain people at the bottom end of the financial food chain: What were you thinking?

It’s a question on everybody’s mind now – usually in the form of sanctimonious “I-told-you-so” op-ed rants that contribute nothing to anybody’s understanding. And yet the ranters have a point: It’s true that a significant number of these foreclosures were utterly inevitable. An example: I read in the Washington Post a story that mentioned a protest at the Baltimore office of the Department of Housing and Urban Development. One of the protesters was a single mother who had bought a $545,000 house in 2006 and then lost it when she couldn’t make the $4,450 monthly mortgage payments. Her income was $50,000, plus an unspecified level of child support. Do the math: $4,450 times 12 is $53,400. That means her entire income plus a chunk of child support would have gone just for shelter – never mind food or clothing or, I don’t know, maybe gas for the car.

So: What was she thinking? What are we to make of her situation? There are plenty of foreclosure stories about immigrants, elderly people, people who were doing just fine until an unforeseen health crisis brought home the limitations of their medical insurance, people who were hoodwinked by scam artists. Those we all understand. But that leaves a significant swath of the mortgage crisis unexamined. What about the garbage truck driver who somehow thought he could afford a $450,000 home, or the upstanding, salt-of-the-earth building engineer who took out not one but two mortgages, putting no money down, to move into a $725,000 mansion? Who, just coincidentally, three years later was shot and killed in a police chase after he robbed a bank? Perhaps those two events were unrelated, but you can’t fault the reader for wondering.

Stories that feature the Utterly Foreseeable Foreclosure are good, as far as they go; journalists would be fundamentally dishonest if they reported on only the sympathetic victims. What’s curious is that, having been honest enough to present us with problematical victims, the stories fail to follow up. Why not? Well, sure, some questions come across as tacky, and “What made you think a garbage truck driver could afford a $450,000 house?” is a really tacky question. And ordinarily, the answer to it would be a matter for the garbage truck driver and his loan officer. But these are times in which an awful lot of garbage truck drivers – and day-care providers and low-level civil servants and commission salesmen and so on – bought an awful lot of incredibly expensive houses, which makes this a question of public interest. And how big a piece of the puzzle is this, anyway? Is there any way to break down the number of foreclosures into categories like Bad Luck, Hoodwinked and Irrationally Exuberant?

So far, though, all we can do is theorize at the human motivations that drove people in the last category to buy things they could not afford. Was it just an unthinking belief in the upward march of prosperity – that since mom and dad had Formica countertops, their kids automatically graduate to polished granite? Was it consumer brainwashing? Because it’s everywhere; I’ve lost count of the number of movies and television shows I’ve seen in which characters in entry-level jobs or working in low-paying professions live in houses twice as nice as the one my husband and I can barely afford to pay for. (Not to mention the clothes! In real life, the only freelance writers who dress as well as Carrie on “Sex and the City” are writers who shoplift.) Did they think money would fall out of the sky, that every job guarantees yearly promotions and big, fat end-of-year bonuses? If so, what made them think that?

I’d love to see a thoughtful, nuanced story asking these kind of questions, some reporting that delved into the collective psyche of the American consumer and told us what it found there, even at the risk of asking rude questions. There is, after all, no journalistic rule I know of that says reporters can ask rude questions of only public figures. At the risk of having the shade of Ralph McGill rise up to haunt me for beating a folksy metaphor to death, I will elaborate on it: There’s no way to get the hay down where the mules can get at it without occasionally stepping in some … digested hay.

Talk to Tracy Thompson at tracythompson@fastmail.fm.