New York Times reporter Edmund Andrews “Busted” has set off quote a firestorm.
First, Andrews had had a piece in the New York Times magazine, along with a bit on NPR‘s “All Things Considered.” Bloggers blogged about it, including Matt Y., Tim Fernholz in Tapped and Megan McArdle. Steve Sailer was less sympathetic.
Then McArdle read the book:
So this weekend, I read the book from which the New York Times article I blogged about on Friday was excerpted. I feel a little differently now, though not enough to take back anything I wrote.
Andrews spends a lot of time defending not feeling bad, because after all, the banks shouldn’t have lent him money. This is true, they shouldn’t, and anyone who did should be profusely apologizing to their shareholders. But when you read the book, what you discover is that while the book is ostensibly about our Great National Borrowing Binge, for Andrews, the debt is really a sideshow. He couldn’t afford to get married. At all.
After his alimony payments, Andrews was taking home $2770 a month, or about what I took home when I was a junior web editor at The Economist. On this, he expected to support a wife and several children who came attached to a meagre $700 a month in child support. Presumably, their joint income was so low because the emotional (though not yet physical) relationship between Andrews and his now wife is what triggered their respective divorces.
McArdle posts again:
But en route to that moral, it turns out the story has been tidied up a little. Patty Barreiro, Andrews’ wife, has declared bankruptcy twice. The second time was while they were married, a detail that didn’t make it into either the book or the excerpt that ran in last Sunday’s New York Times Magazine.
Andrews’ desire to shield his wife is understandable–hell, laudable. No decent person wants to parade their spouse’s financial trouble in front of the world. But this is material information that changes the tenor of his story. Serial bankruptcy is not a creation of the current credit crisis, and it doesn’t just happen to anyone, particularly anyone with a six figure salary.
And the pile-on continued:
Alexandra Gutierrez at Tapped
Via The Newshour website, Andrews responded:
But Megan McArdle, a blogger for the Atlantic, accuses me of omitting crucial information: namely, that my wife, Patty, was involved in two bankruptcies, one in 1998 with her former husband; and one in 2007, while she was married to me. McArdle says this is “material information that changes the tenor of the story,” and then accuses Patty of “serial bankruptcy.”
These bankruptcies did occur, but they had nothing to do with our mortgage woes. They were both tied to old debts from before we were married or bought a house. They had nothing to do with my ability to get a mortgage; nor did they have anything to do with our subsequent financial problems.
Clark Hoyt, public editor at NYT, responds to the critiques.
McArdle responds to Andrews’s response.
More later.
UPDATE: Matt Welch in Reason
Ezra Klein writes that NYT should have mentioned McArdle by name, instead of “a blogger for The Atlantic.”
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