Sunday’s RS had a cover story (no less) about some local real estate agents hosting a seminar to “help” homeowners facing foreclosure. It posted the article as though it were news worthy of the cover, above the fold. At the seminar will be information, some for a fee, that will help them avoid foreclosure.
So let me see if I have this right RS. We gather the most vulnerable of our citizens, possibly already victimized, and put them in a room to face further possible exploitation. The information about avoiding foreclosure is freely available at the government site http://www.HUD.gov , but that’s deliberately not mentioned in favor of some gibberish about a Google search. The team of real estate agents ostensibly offers this info as a service, but then admits they are “aligned” with firms that will charge a fee for this information.
In my opinion, no real estate agent actively engaged in selling foreclosures should be allowed to publicly advise individuals on how to avoid foreclosure. There is just too great a potential conflict of interest. When the “advice” fails, the agent gets a chance to sell your house. There is no incentive for the agent to help at all, but many opportunities for further exploitation.
The huge conflict of interest is never even mentioned in the news article, much less questioned vigorously. The terrible irony that the agent’s aligned vendors will be charging fees to people who already can’t pay their mortgage is ignored. The RS has chosen to deliberately abrogate its responsibilities to some of our community’s most vulnerable population, in favor of a large advertiser’s potentially predatory business interest.
The RS recent fall from its formerly held position of neutral journalism has become complete. Our paper is in economic crisis to be sure. But the real crisis at the RS is at the editorial department, where time-honored standards of journalistic integrity and common sense have vanished.
I’m so angry about this. Not so much at the local real estate agents, who are simply taking advantage of the newspaper’s lack of journalistic integrity to further their highly questionable business venture. I’m angry and frightened that we no longer have a newspaper worthy of the place in our community it had once established as an impartial, investigative journal. All it would have taken would have been a couple of OBVIOUS ethical questions. It might then even have become a story worth the front page, although for perhaps different reasons than the agents had hoped.
There is a link to the article HERE. Bear in mind that online, it carries little of the weight that its position ON THE FRONT PAGE OF THE SUNDAY EDITION granted the article. If you are not a subscriber, you wouldn’t have that perspective. You can be forgiven for not being a subscriber at this point.
