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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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Businessweek warns us that brown people may start buying homes again and crash the economy
By Eclectablog on February 28, 2013 in Racism
They MADE the predatory banksters give them loans, by gawd
Bloomberg Businessweek jumped completely off of the rails with their magazine’s cover image this week. Have a look:
The title says “The Great American Housing Rebound — Flips. No-look bids. 300 percent returns. What could possibly go wrong?”
Now, if you want to talk about banks giving out loans to people that have no business with a mortgage, you could show shady banker-types tricking gullible people into signing papers. Instead, Businessweek elected to show a house with:
•An African American woman who looks like child that’s as stupid as the dog who she is feeding money to.
•A buxom Latina showing some sexy cleavage and waving a fistful of cash.
•Another Hispanic-looking woman deleriously scooping up armsful of cash.
•A wild-eyed African American man leaning out the window to show off his fistful of cash.
You see? Those brown people ruined everything and they are about to do so again when they buy their house that has money coming out of the faucets and the windows and the chimney and the downspouts. Hell, even the rodents that live in the house have money in their mouths. Why, they are just robbing all the upstanding white people blind, by the looks of it. Stupid, evil brown people.
Politico reports that Businessweek has kinda sorta apologized:
“Our cover illustration last week got strong reactions, which we regret,” Josh Tyrangiel, the magazine’s editor, wrote in a statement sent to POLITICO. “Our intention was not to incite or offend. If we had to do it over again we’d do it differently.”
No doubt. As the Politico piece mentions, The Atlantic Cities‘ Emily Badger points out that the article doesn’t even bother to mention “the role of predatory lending”.
But the most perplexing part of the whole affair is the fact that the magazine’s cover – and the story insinuated by it – bears no relation to the actual article contained inside (which has a notably less sexy headline online: “A Phoenix Housing Boom Forms, in Hint of U.S. Recovery”). That piece makes no mention of the racial dynamics of the housing market, or the role of predatory lending.
Of course it doesn’t. It’s the brown people’s fault, not the greedy banksters who signed them up for mortgages anyone with a brain knew they could never pay back.
At least they left out the fried chicken, watermelons and tacos, eh? I guess that’s what passes for progress these days.
Shameful.
[H/T Matt Yglesias at Salon.com] |
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Fri Mar 01, 2013 10:11 pm |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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Huffington Post
Now that Newsweek is out of print, there's a vacuum to be filled in the whole "trollgaze" cover game. Bloomberg Businessweek has apparently decided to fill it with a cover story on the return of the housing bubble, which they've chosen to doll up in the style of "How Rastus Got His Turkey" by filling their cover image with a collection of vile depictions of blacks and Hispanics:
Apparently, we are all a little late in discovering this, but over at the Columbia Journalism Review, Ryan Chittum gives good outrage:
The cover stands out for its cast of black and Hispanic caricatures with exaggerated features reminiscent of early 20th century race cartoons. Also, because there are only people of color in it, grabbing greedily for cash. It’s hard to imagine how this one made it through the editorial process.
Compounding the first-glance problem with the image is the fact that race has been a key backdrop to the subprime crisis.
Chittum goes on to note that the "narrative of the crash on the right has been the blame-minority-borrowers line, sometimes via dog whistle, often via bullhorn." That's very true. But regardless of whether you believe the "blame-minority-borrowers line" has merit or not, most of the people who argue it does at least stop short of using "Blue Gum Negro"-era racist tropes as part of their argument.
This is not the first time that Bloomberg Businessweek has done something strange with their cover. It's not the first time they've done something plainly risible with their cover. However, this is the first time they've put out a cover so manifestly gross that I can't imagine touching it without disinfecting my hand thereafter.
UPDATE: And, the Bloomberg Businessweek apology, via Dylan Byers:
"Our cover illustration last week got strong reactions, which we regret," Josh Tyrangiel, the magazine's editor, wrote in a statement sent to POLITICO. "Our intention was not to incite or offend. If we had to do it over again we'd do it differently."
UPDATE, 5:22pm: Rachel Nagler, Head of Communications for the magazine, passes along a note from Andres Guzman, the illustrator: "The assignment was an illustration about housing. I simply drew the family like that because those are the kind of families I know. I am Latino and grew up around plenty of mixed families."
All well and good as a contextual footnote, but this feels more like throwing an illustrator under the bus for the crimes of people above his pay grade. Guzman is perfectly entitled to view "an illustration about housing" through a cultural lens of his own perspective, but he's not a layout editor or an executive editor or a publisher or any number of people who may have had oversight over the decision to run this cover. Everyone else at Bloomberg Businessweek lives in the world as well, and in that world, they know full well about the "blame-minority-borrowers" line, and they should understand how the image reads, conventionally, as Jim Crow-era cartoons. I don't have any ill will for Guzman over this, his explanation is perfectly sensible. But at some point in the process he ought to have been told that this image wasn't actually okay, and why that was.
READ THE WHOLE THING:
A BusinessWeek cover crosses a line [CJR] |
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Fri Mar 01, 2013 10:20 pm |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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Friday, March 01, 2013. Last Update: Fri 7:00 PM EST
Columbia Journalism Review
06:50 AM - February 28, 2013
A BusinessWeek cover crosses a line
Minorities as greedy grotesqueries fueling a new housing bubble
By Ryan Chittum
Bloomberg BusinessWeek is a lot edgier than its predecessor, at least where design is concerned. Sometimes it’s too edgy, like when it takes two minutes to read some headline intentionally designed to be barely legible.
You can particularly see this walk-up-to-the-line philosophy in its covers, which over the last year or so have pushed the line on what’s okay for a respected mass market magazine.
There was the airplanes-having-sex cover, which was amusing:
Then there was the Mormon business empire cover depicting John the Baptist telling Joseph Smith to pursue filthy lucre:
Lots of Mormons thought that crossed over into sacrilege. But it’s certainly defensible considering that, as BW’s good reporting showed, the church does indeed run itself like a tax-favored holding company. My problem with that cover was that “Hallelujah” is mostly an evangelical exclamation, not an LDS one, which seemed to signal the ever popular out-of-touch secular-media thing.
But this week’s BizWeek cover, for a story on the return of bubble behavior to the housing market, is clearly a mistake:
The cover stands out for its cast of black and Hispanic caricatures with exaggerated features reminiscent of early 20th century race cartoons. Also, because there are only people of color in it, grabbing greedily for cash. It’s hard to imagine how this one made it through the editorial process.
Compounding the first-glance problem with the image is the fact that race has been a key backdrop to the subprime crisis.
The narrative of the crash on the right has been the blame-minority-borrowers line, sometimes via dog whistle, often via bullhorn.
It’s a narrative that has, not coincidentally, dovetailed with “Obamaphone” baloney, the ACORN pseudo-scandal, and Southern politicians calling the first black president “food-stamp president,” and is meant to take the focus off the ultimate culprits: mortgage lenders with no scruples and the Wall Street banks who financed them.
In fact, though, the record is clear: minorities were disproportionately targeted by predatory lending, which has always gone hand in hand with subprime. Even when they qualified for prime loans that similar-circumstance whites got, they were pushed into higher-interest subprimes.
In other words, minority borrowers were disproportionately victimized in the bubble. But BusinessWeek here has them on the cover bathing in housing-ATM cash, implying that they’re going to create another bubble.
That’s not okay.
Ryan Chittum , a former Wall Street Journal reporter, is deputy editor of The Audit, CJR's business section. If you see notable business journalism, give him a heads-up at rc2538@columbia.edu.
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Fri Mar 01, 2013 10:24 pm |
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untanglingwebs
El Supremo
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More on that BusinessWeek cover
A firestorm over its unintentionally inflammatory art
By Ryan Chittum
My post on this unfortunate Bloomberg BusinessWeek cover touched off a wave of fury on the intertubes this morning.
First, there’s a lot of nonsense going around about whether BW was intentionally racist, which is silly. The problem here is that the magazine just flat missed how the cover would be construed.
The cover artist was Andres Guzman, a native of Peru who says, in an email passed along by BusinessWeek that, “The assignment was an illustration about housing. I simply drew the family like that because those are the kind of families I know. I am Latino and grew up around plenty of mixed families.” (On a totally uninteresting side note: Here’s where I make sure to link to Matt Yglesias, who had the Guzman statement first, at least. Yglesias’ link-and-credit-stingy aggregation four hours after my post is pretty irritating, particularly since folks like the NYT and New York credit him with the story. Good thing I’m not paid by the click!).
It surely wasn’t Guzman’s intent to draw a racially insensitive picture, and his own racial background is mostly irrelevant. The real problem is, as I wrote, that the picture made it through a BW editorial structure that is well familiar with American racial history and imagery, and onto the cover of the magazine. Part of the point of having an institution is to keep things like this from happening. This passed through too many editorial gatekeepers who missed the problem with the cover. It’s the whole machine that’s responsible for what it spits out.
The actual story itself, which is very good, has nothing to say about minorities in particular. But as I noted in my previous post, a publication has to be aware of the concerted effort to misdirect blame for the subprime crisis from the banks who caused it to the lower-income blacks and Latinos who were disproportionately victimized in it. And it has to see how its image would play right into that—even if the caricatures hadn’t unintentionally resembled racist cartoons from a hundred years ago.
The National Association of Black Journalists says this today:
“The image that was published by Bloomberg BusinessWeek is just a microcosm of a bigger problem in the magazine industry—the lack of diversity,” said NABJ President Gregory Lee Jr. “The last presidential election demonstrated that our nation’s demographics are changing rapidly and it is essential that media companies should make the appropriate changes to welcome diversity in their newsrooms, specifically in managerial positions.”
The irony here, though, is that BW may have taken false comfort from the fact the artist himself was a racial minority, not realizing how it would look on its face to everyone else.
In other words, this is a big screw-up, but it wasn’t in bad faith. BusinessWeek is a very good magazine and Editor Josh Tyrangiel has reinvigorated it under Bloomberg’s patronage, as I’ve written. That’s not meant in any way to excuse what happened, just to put it in context.
Another unfortunate thing about this is that the cover controversy has overshadowed Susan Berfield’s report from Phoenix on the return of bubble behavior to some housing markets, fueled in part by bigtime investors.
Is this journalism? It attacks banks for allegedly victimizing people who voluntarily took out subprime loans. Obviously that's one legitimate opinion, but there are other viewpoints, and there is more than one factor at play. |
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Fri Mar 01, 2013 10:28 pm |
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Dave Starr
F L I N T O I D
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| Bloomberg Buisnessweek, as in Michael Bloomberg, the mayor of New York? The mayor that banned large soft drinks & guns for everyone except his hollywood friends? |
_________________
I used to care, but I take a pill for that now.
Pushing buttons sure can be fun.
When a lion wants to go somewhere, he doesn’t worry about how many hyenas are in the way.
Paddle faster, I hear banjos. |
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Sat Mar 02, 2013 8:16 am |
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