Occasionally, I like to share my public editor’s mailbag about what readers are saying about The Bee and its coverage of various issues. So let’s get started.
Much has been written in the paper about Sacramento’s and the state’s slumping housing market. Reader Ron W. Loutzenhiser of Galt thinks the paper is using a double standard.
He complained about a recent front-page story describing how investors and others are taking advantage of the market to buy struggling properties at bargain prices.
What really set him off was the story’s labeling of such investors as “bottom feeders.”
” ‘Bottom feeders’ is a derogatory term when applied to people or businesses,” Loutzenhiser wrote in an e-mail. “It implies that they are scavengers, less than desirable people to do business with.”
Why, he asked, doesn’t the paper use the same term when writing about those who buy stocks when they are low?
Instead, he said, they’re called “smart investors.”
“It would appear that The Bee has a double standard relating to real estate and stocks,” he said.
He raises an interesting point, although, as I explained to him, the phrase “bottom feeders” was set off in quote marks, fit the context of the story and didn’t strike me as gratuitous.
Yet I see where some readers would take offense. Or, as Loutzenhiser said, “There are many of us who were too smart to buy overpriced property, and we don’t like being called bottom feeders!”
In a similar vein, reader Bob Fairbanks of Sacramento criticized the paper for sensationalizing news about home foreclosures.
He was reacting to a recent front-page story about foreclosures and defaults reaching the highest rates ever recorded in California and that the outlook continued to look grim.
The “page one story today with its huge graphic and headline declaring ‘Foreclosures soar to state record’ omitted a key statistic that could have seriously diminished the story’s sensationalistic tone,” wrote Fairbanks, a retired journalist, in his digital missive.
“And that is the number of California mortgages that are NOT being foreclosed. If it turns out that the number of foreclosures, though increasing, remains in some minuscule range, then this ‘sky is falling’ tale clearly belongs more in a supermarket tabloid than in our esteemed Sacramento Bee.”
He said he checked the numbers and believes the overall foreclosure rate for all mortgaged homes and condos is in the 1 percent or 2 percent range.
“Important and worth a story? Of course. But why omit the number that gives perspective? Why make the situation seem more dire than it is?”
I think it’s more a matter of the paper being inconsistent, although on a big story like this one, the overall number of mortgages should have been included for context.
The Bee has published many stories about the housing downturn, and used many figures – including the ones Fairbanks wanted to see – to put the slump in perspective.
But it doesn’t use those figures all the time, particularly when the stories are short and straightforward.
And there’s another point to make, too.
While the vast majority of mortgages are indeed fine, the record-breaking foreclosures and the protracted housing decline have affected all homeowners.
It doesn’t matter if you are current with your payments and your mortgage is solid, chances are your home is worth less than it was a year ago.
For the most part, the paper’s stories have examined and explained that broader context, although almost any housing story these days – big or small – is guaranteed to generate reader feedback.
On another subject, several readers criticized the lead story in Sunday’s Jan. 13 paper headlined, “Horrors of war brought home. At least 121 veterans of Afghan, Iraq wars accused in homicides after return, newspaper finds.”
That newspaper was the New York Times, and its story in The Bee was the first of a series in the Times called “War Torn,” which examined the psychological and mental problems afflicting some returning veterans.
The story’s statistics were faulty and didn’t support its conclusions, complained readers. The overall tone, they said, demonized veterans.
The Times’ public editor, Clark Hoyt, wrote in his column last week that the story used “squishy numbers” and “questionable statistics” in trying to document a trend.
You can read Hoyt’s column, headlined “Stories That Speak for Themselves,” at the Times’ Web site, www.nytimes.com.
A few readers took issue with a recent feature story on the cover of Metro about a young and rising local star in the brutal sport of cage fighting.
The story described how the fighter “has kicked, punched, clinched, chopped and choked his way to the top of the ultimate fighting game, a crowd favorite with a worldwide following.”
The fighter talked about how he recently used a “guillotine hold” to subdue a highly ranked competitor: “I’m cutting off the air to his mouth and his brain. It’s not painful – it feels like drowning.”
That was too much for readers such as Michael Hill-Weld, who felt the story had no business being in the paper.
“I strongly object to the glorification of the ‘sport’ of cage fighting,” said Hill-Weld’s e-mail.
As for the detailed description of the guillotine hold, he said, “This hold sounds a lot like ‘waterboarding,’ which most people consider torture.
“While this ‘sport’ may be legal, I do not think it is the type of sport we want to encourage our young people to take up. What could the editor have been thinking even assigning someone to write the article and then splashing it across the front of the Metro section?”
My take is the story was legitimate but belonged in sports. That’s where readers expect to find stories about boxing and cage fighting, and where gruesome details about the guillotine hold would be less shocking.
