A friend of mine handed me The Seat­tle Times and asked: “have you seen this?” I hadn’t but I did catch the tiny byline cred­it­ing a writer of The Wall Street Jour­nal with the arti­cle. I had read part of the arti­cle in the Jour­nal but the head­line in the Times did not look famil­iar. Curi­ous, I took the local paper home with the idea to com­pare the Times arti­cle to the original.

I am a Real­ist and a Realtor®

Before com­par­ing the two arti­cles, let me say that I’m a real­ist. Home prices are still com­ing down in Seat­tle land but they are not “crash­ing down” as they have in parts of Florida, Ari­zona and Cal­i­for­nia. I’m a real­ist who makes his daily liv­ing in this busi­ness and I have every rea­son to keep in touch with reality.

The National Story and the Local Story

Hyper­bole cuts Both Ways.

The real­ity includes naively opti­mistic and bor­ing adver­tis­ing by the National Asso­ci­a­tion of Real­tors (NAR) on one side (I’m a mem­ber) and on the other side jus­ti­fi­ably neg­a­tive media reports about the country’s finan­cial affairs in gen­eral and in par­tic­u­lar the hous­ing mar­ket. The prob­lem is that some of these neg­a­tive national reports are manip­u­lated to give the impres­sion that they are writ­ten and pro­duced for the local market.

Acci­den­tal or Inten­tional Misrepresentation?

The ques­tion is if this impres­sion is acci­den­tal or inten­tional. Judg­ing by the edited “reprint” of the WSJ arti­cle in The Seat­tle Times (ST) I can only con­clude that the ST did every­thing pos­si­ble to give the impres­sion that this story was about the Seat­tle real estate market.

Sell­ing Doom

The most obvi­ous dif­fer­ence is in the head­line. The WSJ head­line describes the story’s con­tent, while the local head­line is meant to shock. Not enough, the ST edi­tor added an into­duc­tory para­graph lifted from the body of the arti­cle and reworded it so it would appear more neg­a­tive and look as if it described the Seat­tle real estate market.

Stu­pid­ity or Bla­tant Manipulation?

Below the small-print “byline” that iden­ti­fies the WSJ writer of the story, the first para­graph shows addi­tonal edit­ing to give the impres­sion of this being a local story. The WSJ states “House prices have crashed more than 35% in some parts of the coun­try.” (empha­sis mine) which the ST edi­tor changed to “…in some areas.” What areas are we talk­ing about here? Some areas of Seat­tle, the east­side, King, Pierce or Sno­homish county?

Irre­spon­si­ble Journalism

There’s noth­ing wrong with edit­ing to make a story rel­e­vant to the local read­er­ship or shorten it to fit the avail­able space. (The Seat­tle Times reprint left out sev­eral para­graphs from the orig­i­nal WSJ arti­cle.) How­ever, when a local news­pa­per manip­u­lates a thought­ful, even-handed story from a national paper so as to frighten the locals into buy­ing the local news­pa­per, that’s sim­ply irresponsible.