This just in: Government discovers rumor!

Can’t fool Washington. It’s just slow on the uptake.
Word-of-mouth is humankind’s oldest form of communication.
Dame Rumor flies, wrote ancient poets such as Virgil. Truth is a pedestrian.
The feds were bound to get around to investigating that hare and tortoise race.
The Securities and Exchange Commission wants Wall Street to stop spreading false information.
Lots of luck with that.
Those turkey buzzards of day trading, the short sellers, make a living from bad information and misinformation and disinformation. They borrow stock at a high price to sell low and pocket the difference.
The shorters naturally benefit if gossip hurts a company on the Exchange while they hold its paper.
Speculation flitted right behind rumor out of Pandora’s box.
Journalism could tell federal regulators all information is baseless until verified.
But fact-checking is a tedious process that suffers when a reporter is close to deadline and when the financial world is in near panic mode as it is lately.
So we shouldn’t be cynical either about editors’ stern warning to authenticate or the SEC’s crackdown on illegal trading practices.
Realism simply tells us rumor mongering is a never ending story, with us always.
The wagging tongue as way-of-life is how vast numbers of non-readers of newspapers and non-watchers of TV are getting their news these days. Much of the news actually is commentary if not downright gossip.
Abandon all hope for straight poop as you enter the blogosphere. Yes, this blog is an outpost in the vastness of cyberspace too.
That’s why you see my name, my picture, my bona fide credentials listed – the stuff of credibility, the eternal enemy of rumor.
Trusted sources: That’s what professional journalism is all about, regardless of media platform.
The government might defeat rumor in the marketplace. Not likely. But it might. The weapon would be instantly available truth, denial, explanation to counter every whisper.
But that would require government, corporations and the financial world to be quick with credibility too.
Every reporter knows those institutions trade in deception and withheld information and controlled flow of news.
So short sellers and average citizens take rumors for granted.
Credible journalism can’t. That’s why there’ll always be a market for honest reporting.
Uphill battle that it is with Dame Rumor whispering in your ear.

Bed sheets, bazookas: New Yorker, the hen

Eustace Tilley blew this one.
If you know that name, you probably “got” the Barack-o-drama cover of The New Yorker.
Satire is a double meaning the reader is in on. Or else it’s a scam.
If the shock of the image allows a viewer to take it seriously, the artistic or literary trick becomes a mere antic, a ruse, a hustle.
The questioned cover shows Mr. and Mrs. Obama as flag burning terrorists in the Oval Office. “Politics of fear,” is the satiric target by cartoonist Barry Blitt.
Trouble is, polls show some Americans believe – wrongly, but believe anyway – the lies connecting Islam, Osama bin Laden and the possible First Couple.
Those of us who don’t believe are nervous that we live in a society where some do harbor or even foster those untruths. So we’re not too keen for the cover either.
We prefer an information campaign.
The New Yorker tried the humor of disinformation and laid an egg.
Hey, Eustace is a buddy of mine, fictional though he is. I delight in seeing the signature dandy on the front of the magazine. He’s the logo. He’s the sophistication. He’s a pretty good clothes horse, often depicted by TNY satirically with props.
Editor David Remnick can sly up the magazine’s symbol, can satirize public figures, can make fun of our social foibles.
Surely he can do a take-off on the Democrat with a funny name and a funny past and a serious chance of becoming president.
Well, yes. If he can answer one question: Does the cover communicate?
Not to Eustace’s standard is the answer.
Remnick knows how hard irony is to wield as a means of conversation. And he must know he goofed. Because he’s trying to explain the joke. That’s proof positive the joke fell as flat as a magazine cover.
It’s as lame as New York Times editor Bill Keller trying to explain the paper meant to say Republican presidential candidate John McCain showed poor judgment about ethics, not that he had an affair necessarily.
Manhattan is an island. Those editors need to swim to shore more often.
For The Times to link sex and a politician was to run a public DNA test on his bed sheets.
For The New Yorker to attack ignorance with sophistication was to bring a pen knife to a bazooka fight.

Sen. Gramm’s Ph.D. economy goof while 'helping out' Sen. McCain proves public, press, politicians need a common language

Let’s drop the word “economics” in favor of “quality of life.”
Public, politicians and media might get it right then.
Sen. John McCain’s Republican quest to be president is but the latest to foul up. He did it through a stand-in, former Sen. Phil Gramm.
We’re but a “nation of whiners,” said that Ph.D. in economics. Gramm claimed we’re only in a “mental recession.”
Insert funny comment here: Maybe it’s the professor who has the receding mind…he taught at Texas A&M, so maybe this is an aggie joke gone bad…or as Barack Obama, leader of the Democratic presidential camp commented, “America already has one Dr. Phil.”
We don’t need a shrink to know we can’t buy or sell houses, afford fuel and food, meet the hidden tax of rising college tuition, find a job in some cases or get a raise in others.
John McCain still thinks trickle down works, corporations will save us out of the goodness of their hearts and oil policy means greasing the palms of petro execs yet again.
He’s a goose egg on money matters. So he uses Gramm to tell him what to think. But no one told Gramm how to speak.
To be fair we lack a common language about finances. An egghead looks at the numbers, the institutions, the science of capitalism and sees the engine running right along.
The people see only the result and feel the engine running them down.
Reporters don’t translate between the two opposites, which is why God invented journalism – so media would communicate.
When the Gramm-McCain gaffe broke, that’s all the story was. Media treated it as yet another misstep in the political pasture full of language cow patties.
In journalism we call this a daily process story, because it lacks context.
An enterprising reporter covering Gramm-McCain could have, might have, should have included news of the whole day: \

• The federal government is stepping up to support the two mortgage holders that account for half the nation’s mortgages, which add up to $12 trillion.
• Banks are in the tank.
• Gas isn’t, because of costs, which won’t quit with President Bush drawing a military bead on Iran.
• Food expense is tied to fuel.
• Goalposts for retirement keep moving because of all of above.

We’re not whining, Dr. Gramm. We’re living life and enjoying it less. We’re also reading the papers.
We’re just not reading the right story. It would put two and two together, linking screwy political views, the public’s disconnect from brainy economists and daily living.
No more petty political items. No more campaign gotchas. No more disconnects.
Media need to change the language: It’s not the economy, stupid. It’s the quality of life.
Then we would no longer be a nation joined asunder by so many misunderstandings about the meaning of money.
That’s one thing we all have in common, money, but commonly not enough.