Readers of the Sunday New York Times found a scowling, unshaven Larry Summers on the front page, accompanying an article that questioned his fitness to lead the Fed given his close ties to Wall Street. The article was a first-rate takedown – a savaging that was thin on facts and lacking any kind of balance. You don’t have to be a fan of Larry Summers to have been offended by it.
Over the past few weeks, the favorite sport of the Washington set has been campaigning for the next chairman of the Federal Reserve, an appointment President Obama will make later this fall to replace outgoing chairman Ben Bernanke.
Washington seems divided into two camps – those who favor Larry Summers and those bitterly opposed to him – and editorial pages, talk-shows and blogs have been working overtime. The fight has become so heated that President Obama decried the attacks against Summers.
And now the Sunday Times has jumped into the fray, with a 2500-word assault on Summers. You can tell it’s a takedown because it follows six rules:
1. Recycle old facts. To make the front page, your story has to break news – reveal the previously unknown, dig up what’s been kept secret. Or at least make it seem that way. So, for the piece on Summers, we are told of his consulting gigs with banks and hedge funds, his board appointments in Silicon Valley and his tumultuous exit from the Harvard presidency. All of this has been amply reported before. But when you’re doing a takedown, old facts must be made to sound new.
2. Leave your central premise unchallenged. The main contention in the piece is that Larry Summers is an opportunist who is too rich and too connected to be Fed chairman. No one in the piece refutes that, so the allegation sticks. Takedown accomplished.
Of course, we don’t know if the writer tried to get someone to respond to the charge, or even if the question was ever put in those terms. But when you’re writing a takedown such quibbling details don’t matter. (Summers’s PR people should have pushed harder for a chance to respond, even if he refused to be interviewed.)
3. Bury inconvenient facts. Anything that might thwart your takedown should be safely tucked into the back of your story. It’s there, so you can say you’ve been balanced in your treatment of the victim, err, subject.
So, deep into the Times article (paragraph 31, to be precise) we learn that appointing people to government posts who have Wall Street ties is hardly new. In fact, two former chairmen of Goldman Sachs (a den of infamy to the Times) served as Treasury secretaries – Bob Rubin and Hank Paulson. We also learn, one paragraph later, that if Summers became Fed chairman he would be required to divest himself of any interests in financial companies. That’s rather important to tell your readers, if they make it that far.
4. Cite obscure “experts.” Every news article needs to cite a few experts, and when you’re doing a takedown it really doesn’t matter whom you pick. The Times trots out a consumer advocate from the New Economy Project to express concern about the lending practices of a company where Summers is a director. The NEP – now renamed the Neighborhood Economic Development Advocacy Project – has a mission to “promote financial justice” in New York communities. They’re not exactly experts on banking.
5. Make it personal. Nothing sticks like an allegation made by a friend. This quote appears on the front page, from a Stanford professor who is described as a “friend and co-author” of Summers:
“With Larry, my wife always says that it’s hard to be happy I f you want to have the most money because you’ll never have the most money. He’s kind of been going about his life just on the basis of ‘who knows what’s going to come next?’ and just sort of maximizing this experiences, given the opportunities in front of him.”
Ouch. First the “friend” uses his wife to make a damning comment, then he proceeds to describe Summers as an economic automaton who coldly maximizes his personal value. With friends like this, you don’t need to hear what Summers’s enemies might say. And that’s the whole point: If even your friends can’t say something good, you must be a pretty bad dude.
6. Imply guilt by association. The Times believes Summers is tainted because he cavorts with the “megabank” Citigroup and the “sprawling” hedge fund D. E. Shaw and advises a partnership backed by a hedge fund “active in the derivatives market” (did you follow all that?). Once you link anyone to derivatives, they’re clearly a menace.
I don’t have a view one way or the other about whether Larry Summers ought to be the next Fed chairman. But he deserves better than the public lynching the Times just served up.