5 ms·
This idea was a good one but I want to make a grumpy comment anyway. That "Planet Money" series is on the whole terrible. It's supposed to be in-depth but there
by gruseom 16y ago
This idea was a good one but I want to make a grumpy comment anyway. That "Planet Money" series is on the whole terrible. It's supposed to be in-depth but there's nothing deep about the pieces I've heard, just painfully bad dialogue issued by pseudo-hipsters all imitating Ira Glass to varying degrees of cringitude. I admire Ira Glass too, but this is analogous to folk singers imitating Bob Dylan's nasal whine instead of, you know, writing good songs. As for content, nearly all of what I've heard has been them asking obvious questions of economists who repeat the same obvious half dozen bromides such economists invariably repeat, which the Glassbots then ploddingly translate into even dumber terms, presumably so they can hear the sound of their own voices some more on national radio. That and painfully staged little sketches for idiots, like the one where they go to different supermarkets to play walkie-talkies and conclude that some of them sometimes price things differently.
It's so awful I can't listen to it any more: I find it traumatic to be exposed to people making asses of themselves. That's probably why I'm writing this, to expunge the trauma. Have I just heard the wrong 10 episodes or something?
Some of the economic reporting produced by This American Life, on the other hand, has been superb and genuinely in-depth. Since the intersection of the two sets is non-empty, perhaps the producers are to blame.
- jakarta 16y agoI disagree. Take the reporting on Toxie, their toxic asset. I think what they did was a good idea, I have followed their reporting on it for a while now. First they presented how one actually acquires these assets (they started with a trader and walked through that process) then they actually dug deeper beyond just monitoring the prices. They followed the individual mortgages within the security and found how one was tied to a mortgage fraud scheme and the other was tied to a guy who borrowed beyond his means. I saw similar research put together by a well respected bank's equity research arm that decided to start visiting the homes which corresponded to certain distressed bank loans in Ohio. So overall, I thought the Planet Money team took a really good approach to their story. Is it true that they have to sometimes dumb things down for the masses? Yes. No ordinary person is going to sit there and read through a CDO prospectus. But if I wanted something more in depth I would just listen to my Bloomberg podcasts. Also, your criticism about Planet Money versus TAM seems a bit off base. I have found that Planet Money is the group that most often contributes the economic reporting/segments to TAM. Although there have been times when ProPublica contributes to both.
- joezydeco 16y agoI say it's 50/50. Some days you get Simon Johnson from the Baseline Scenario blog. He tends to do pretty insightful pieces. Other days you get Chana Walt and Caitlin Kenney, who make SNL's "Delicious Dish" skit look like Edward R Murrow. All in all Planet Money did some great pieces during the crazy days of the meltdown and TARP and etc. It certainly helped me understand some of the stuff that was going on in the news with a lot more depth than the rest. The quality has gone downhill somewhat. I think I stopped listening after hearing that back-of-the-throat-H in Chana crackle my car speakers for the 200th time.