The Opposite of Schadenfreude

Monday, April 18 2011

The Opposite of Schadenfreude

There must be some sort of German word for this, a feeling of embarrassment at the journalistic disasters of others.

Because, my Lord! This week’s Newsweek cover story on what they call BWMs (Beached White Males) is an amazing mismash of sloppy stats, poor reasoning and unconscious (at least I hope it’s unconscious) prejudice, all in the service of shoehorning in that ridiculous acronym.

The problems start from the top. The hed and dek for the story from the NWK cover is:

The Beached White Male
He had a big job, a big office, a big bonus. Now he’s all washed up and doesn’t have a freakin’ prayer.

OK—so we read this and think this is going to be a perhaps insensitive (given the fact that this is still the group with the fewest economic problems of any in America) but focused article on a certain small segment of American society. But! Then we look inside, and we see a much different hed:

Can Manhood Survive the Recession?

And, hmm. First we’re told this is about rich white guys, and now we’re told that this is a story about manhood. So, what, black men, with their 16% unemployment rate, don’t count when we’re talking a bout a “crisis of manhood”? Why, because they’re screwed anyway? Because Tina Brown doesn’t even acknowledge they exist?

Next, this quote, from Calculated Risk, is trotted out early on to make the case:

Once college-educated workers hit 45, notes a post on the professional-finance blog Calculated Risk, “if they lose their job, they are toast.”

Awful. Scary. And, yet, not necessarily just about rich white men! It turns out that women go to college too. And minorities. And sometimes they find jobs, though, yes, they are more likely to lose them than their white male counterparts. Again and again the statistics in this piece conflate all white-collar job loss with losses by white men. For instance, here:

From the financial meltdown in late 2007 that led to the recession up to now, the rolls of all unemployed white professional men have more than doubled, to a million (not including sales jobs, which add another 300,000). Wall Street and the broader world of business culled the most, laying off more than 300,000 from their trading desks and cubicle farms. Firms that draw on computer skills also thinned about 50,000 men from their ranks. Architects and engineers, the hardest hit by the housing crash, saw almost 90,000 casualties. In each category, the unemployment rate doubled—and then some.

Because, wait, were all those 300,000 lost Wall St. jobs filled by men? Professional men? White professional men? Hell no. Plenty of women, minorities lost jobs as well; and I’ll bet the majority weren’t corporate VP gigs; they were secretaries, HR people, back-office workers, etc.

UPDATE: Tony Dokoupil, one of the authors of the piece, emails to correct me. These numbers are indeed the correct numbers: 300,000 net job losses among white professional men on Wall Street from 2006-1st quarter 2011. My apologies for misreading this.

Then there’s the poll. NWK talks to 250 unemployed (or underemployed) men. MOST of them are married, white, middle-class and looking for work. So, OK, how did they select these people? Why weren’t they all BWMs? Is this poll national, or just a bunch of people they talked to in NYC? And why in hell was one of the questions “would you give your (working) wife a backrub or drink if she comes home grumpy”? (66% of respondents said yes) Is that supposed to show how far these former masters of the universe have sunk? The horror!

The thing is, I wouldn’t argue that this is not a legitimate line of inquiry. The rich, as Rush Limbaugh so constantly reminds us, suffer too. Too bad this piece didn’t uncover that story.