Shane
Duelling Discourses of Debt by Tanta
Gretchen Morgenson has another wowser in today's New York Times. This one comes with not just a lengthy narrative packed with details about her "exemplary" borrower, but a video in which we hear the borrower's own version of events, as well as seeing her in her "natural habitat."
I confess that I find this video utterly fascinating. The story it tells is all too common; the "analysis" is trite; the implied but never explicitly suggested "solution"--that people like Diane shouldn't be "allowed" to borrow more than they can "afford"--undoubtedly stays unarticulated because the reporter has no intention of being forced to unpack or defend her assumptions about borrower agency, lender paternalism, or the economics of consumer spending.
Indeed, what is fascinating about this video is precisely the near-total contradiction between what the interviewee, Diane, has to say about herself, and what the voiceover and commentary by Morgenson has to say about Diane. That and the loving camera focus on class cues--the repeated panning on the tchochkes, the six! perfectly unnecessary shots of chubby Diane smoking, the capture of the chain-link fence--which tries but never quite succeeds in erasing the impact of Diane's articulate, polite, rather engaging self-presentation. It is as if the camera must keep reassuring itself--the reporter, us--that Diane is "really" an unsophisticated dupe of the lenders, a perpetual victim of circumstances and missteps, by making sure we (the Times reader) see her as "tacky." All the while the camera also records Diane's voice, telling a candid, crisp story that utterly contradicts the reporter's.
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<http://calculatedrisk.blogspot.com/2008/07/duelling-discourses-of-debt.html>