Categories: OLD Media Moves

Real estate coverage: Negative news, or PR spin?

Eugene Meyer of Real Estate Magazine takes a look Wednesday at whether the business media has been overly negative in covering the real estate market.

Meyer wrote, “The lead paragraph on the National Association of Realtors’ Nov. 21 release reported that home sales prices actually rose in most metropolitan markets. The Associated Press lead, however, emphasized the negative statistic that the number of home sales had fallen in 46 states during the third quarter. Both were correct.

“The contrasting reports of NAR and the AP, gleaned from the same press release, reflect a fundamental divide between the real estate industry and the news business. Reporters and editors think the industry is out to spin the numbers to put a smiley face on a grim situation. Their function, as they see it, is to present the facts without such spin.

“But which facts matter? By choosing one important set of data over another, the AP story painted a different, gloomier picture in the public mind, and that, industry critics say, can have dire consequences for the market and the economy in general.

“‘The biggest problem today is out-of-context reporting,’ says NAR spokesman Walter Molony. ‘We have no issues with essential reporting of negative data. But when the media goes out of its way to find the most negative things to say about a statistical report, they’re creating fear that actually impacts the market.'”

Read more here.

Chris Roush

Chris Roush was the dean of the School of Communications at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut. He was previously Walter E. Hussman Sr. Distinguished Professor in business journalism at UNC-Chapel Hill. He is a former business journalist for Bloomberg News, Businessweek, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, The Tampa Tribune and the Sarasota Herald-Tribune. He is the author of the leading business reporting textbook "Show me the Money: Writing Business and Economics Stories for Mass Communication" and "Thinking Things Over," a biography of former Wall Street Journal editor Vermont Royster.

View Comments

  • Thanks to Prof. Geogre Harmon of Northwestern for cutting to the chase on this tedious protest from real estate types. His comment about a deafening lack of objections when the entire US housing market was portrayed as an up-only profit escalator is especially cogent. One thought - some of the reporters and many of the headline writers on RE stories need a refresher course in the difference between average and median. These qualifiers help deflate the hyperbole and would better serve both reader and Realtor. Meanwhile, I fully expect to see housing stories as key to biz reporting in 2008. The cost of gasoline and groceries has been rising quickly and I want to know why, as a journalist and a consumer. Yet this information doesn't keep me from filling my tank and frig every week, it just keeps me better appraised. Last time I checked, that's what brought us into this profession in the first place.

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