NakedCapitalism–
One of the striking things, as the mortgage crisis has ground on, is how persistent and to some degree effective the industry incumbents have been in influencing news stories. One can argue they’ve been more successful than the TBTF banks, perhaps because if you can tank the global economy, keep your job, and still continue to pay yourself egregious bonuses, you don’t need to stoop to throttling every bit of negative coverage. The fact that near-urban legends like strategic defaults are trumpeted in the media as if they are a meaningful phenomenon, or that defenses of securitization practices by firms like K&L Gates, which have liability on their legal opinions, dominated the coverage on that issue for quite some time until more and more court decisions showed their analysis to be sorely wanting, illustrates how much spin there is in what purports to be news.
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