Well, this has hardly been a good week for The New York Times. First, there was the Maureen Dowd plagiarism flap. Now, economics reporter Edmund Andrews' nightmarish personal story about predatory lending, which Tim wrote about earlier this week, is coming under criticism.
After his book Busted: Life Inside the Great Mortgage Meltdown was excerpted by the Times magazine last week, Megan McArdle looked into Andrews' financial history and discovered that his situation is a little bit atypical: His wife, Patricia Barreiro has filed for bankruptcy twice, despite having a six-figure household income, a fact not disclosed in his work. Says Megan:
was excerpted by the Times magazine last week, Megan 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.It's bad enough that this omission is deceitful. Even more problematic is the potential for Andrews' story to do serious damage to the public's understanding of the subprime mortgage crisis.That this pair still secured subprime loans given their unsteadyfinancial history might strengthen Andrews' point that banks werewilling to lend to anyone (with a pulse), but it demolishes the premisethat financial ruin at the hands of lenders could happen to absolutelyanyone (who has worked to be in a secure position). These are twocompletely different things. The former point has been clearlydemonstrated throughout the crisis, but there haven't been manynarratives that successfully explain the latter -- namely, how theresponsible and informed (even middle-class!) reader of The New York Times could wind up losing their home.
Andrews may still be doing a valuable service by being candid about his specific borrowing experiences, and he accepts a good deal of responsibility for poor decision-making. But he sold his story as a simple, cautionary tale of how the subprime crisis could affect "good people with decent jobs." Withholding information about Barreiro's bankruptcies undermines that narrative. In the end, Andrews may be doing a great disservice to the real and much more ordinary victims of predatory lenders.
--Alexandra Gutierrez
