Sunday only

The daily paper has met its demise and I’m kind of nervous about it.

No, I’m not talking about the much panicked over death of print media (here, here (video), and here). I’m talking specifically about the fact that the daily paper will no longer be showing up on my porch every morning.

We’ve had a daily paper subscription in my family, save for the two years my step-father’s Navy career had us living overseas, for as long as I can remember. When DC still had decent print journalism that didn’t entirely revolve around politics, my grandmother actually got two daily papers, The Washington Post in the morning and The Washington Star in the evenings. This sort of explains how I got to be a news junky way before Twitter feeds and RSS and the constantly churning news cycle. It also explains why the idea of not getting the daily paper, even though it was absolutely necessary to cancel it, is making me kind of twitchy.

Cancelling the Post wasn’t just about the rising prices or the shrinking news hole or the fact that to cut costs they seem to have cut anyone in the news room who actually knows how to use a comma or an apostrophe. All those things contributed but what really solidified the idea that maybe it was time to start getting my news somewhere else was the presentation of two stories near the end of May.

You may be aware that there’s a bit of an economic thing happening right now – people losing jobs and homes, the stock markets gyrating like an anorexic on meth – which most deep thinkers attribute largely to something called deriviatives (packages of high-risk investments slapped together with seemingly little regulation).

Now, I know it’s not on a par with the President attempting to fix an election, but don’t you think that if the head of a Federal agency had tried a decade ago to warn both Congress and the Department of Treasury about how dangerous these types of investments were that you might want to write a serious news article about that person? I sure do. The Washington Post, however, put their “profile” of Brooksley Born, former chair of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, on the front page of the Style section.

Friends nudge the woman who saw the catastrophe coming.

They want Brooksley Born to say four words, four simple words: “I told you so.”

Ah, but she won’t — not at legal conferences or dinner parties. Not even in a quiet moment in her living room, giving her first interview with a major news organization since last fall’s economic collapse.

She just smiles, perched ever so properly in an upholstered armchair at her Kalorama home.

“More coffee?” she asks daintily, changing the subject.

A little more than a decade ago, Born foresaw a financial cataclysm, accurately predicting that exotic investments known as over-the-counter derivatives could play a crucial role in a crisis much like the one now convulsing America. Her efforts to stop that from happening ran afoul of some of the most influential men in Washington, men with names like Greenspan and Levitt and Rubin and Summers — the same Larry Summers who is now a key economic adviser to President Obama.

She was the head of a tiny government agency who wanted to regulate the derivatives. They were the men who stopped her.

The same class of derivatives that preoccupied Born — including the now-infamous “credit-default swaps” — have been blamed for accelerating last fall’s financial implosion. But from 1996 to 1999, when Born was the chairman of the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, the U.S. economy was roaring and she was getting nowhere with predictions of doom.

So, upstairs in the big house in Kalorama, Born tossed and turned. She woke repeatedly “in a cold sweat,” agonizing that a financial calamity was coming, she recalled one recent afternoon.

“I was really terribly worried,” she said.

Before taking office, Born had been a high-octane attorney, an American Bar Association power player, a noted advocate of feminist causes and co-founder of the National Women’s Law Center. But none of that carried much weight when she crossed over into government; for all her legal experience, she was a woman who wasn’t adept at playing the game. She could be unyielding and coldly analytical, with a litigator’s absolute assertions of right and wrong. And she was taking on Beltway pros, masters of nuance and palace politics. She marched into congressional hearing after congressional hearing — pin neat, always with a handbag — but no one really wanted to listen.

The Wall Street Journal declared that “the nation’s top financial regulators wish Brooksley Born would just shut up.” The Bond Buyer newspaper compared her to a salmon “swimming against raging currents.”

– “Credit Crisis Cassandra: Brooksley Born’s Unheeded Warning Is a Rueful Echo 10 Years On”, By Manuel Roig-Franziam, The Washington Post, Tuesday, May 26, 2009, C01

When this appeared in the Style section I was willing to overlook the lack of gravitas given to the idea that the same people trying to haul us out of this financial mess are the people who ignored warnings a decade ago that this could happen. I’m sure there was other stuff happening, like the California Supreme Court ruling on proposition 8 and whether or not “cancer boy” was going to be found in time to be treated. I get that the editorial staff, such as it is, might have had other priorities.

But then three days later the Post published this:

Today will unfold just like all the other days for Herb Feemster, the suave “Reunited” and “Shake Your Groove Thing” singer from Southeast Washington who rose to international fame in the 1960s and ’70s with Peaches and Herb.

The 67-year-old soul man with the sweet falsetto will scrape himself out of bed and push off from his suburban Maryland home in the still of the night. He’ll pull into a Penn Quarter parking lot between 4:30 and 5. He’ll put on his patent leather shoes, gray slacks, white shirt, red tie and blue blazer. And by 6, he’ll be on the clock at the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims, where he works as a deputized court security officer for the U.S. Marshals Service.

Never mind that the first new Peaches and Herb album in more than a quarter-century is being released today. Feemster, who uses the stage name Herb Fame, isn’t planning some wild celebration, despite having finally reunited with his recording career. (And yes, it feels so good, ’cause he understood. Of course.)

The idea of a pop star slumming in the working class isn’t a regular part of the celebrity-culture diet. Stars really aren’t supposed to be like us. They’re supposed to lead glamorous lives, always and forever — unless they’re in rehab or on a reality show, or both. But they’re not supposed to be in the middle, with the rest of us workies.

– “For R&B Star, Day Job’s the Real High Note: Peaches & Herb Reunited, but He Favors Lunch-Bucket Life”, J. Freedom du Lac, The Washington Post, Friday, May 29, 2009, A01

Yes, that’s right, page A01. The front page. The same place that banner headlines and articles about 911 and Obama’s election and the attempt on Reagan’s life, and, more recently, the crazy guy shooting up the Holocaust Museum were published.

Now, admittedly, this article was below the fold but still, this is a puff piece, a profile on a local musician who had some success 30+ years ago and might be poised to have some moderate success again. This is a Style section piece if I ever saw one. And yet…there it is on the front page.

It’s not the shrinking news hole. It’s not the fact that increasingly journalists at all publications don’t seem to understand the basic tool of their craft. It’s the fact that they would insult me by trying to make me believe that I should trust the judgement of “gate keepers” who would position these stories the way they did.

For the first time in my life, we’re down to Sunday only delivery on the newspaper. I’m just glad I don’t have to explain this to my grandmother.