Radio (talking)head

The Mute Button

July 31, 2009 | Filed under: News

The good folks at Fox News’s The Strategy Room, which steams online Monday through Friday, have started to send around clips to people who were on. I’ve been going on the show since last fall. It’s great fun, particularly the 3pm hour with Eric Bolling as host. Naturally, I’d like to think I contribute some good points. But watching this clip from The ADD Hour on Tuesday, I’m not so sure . I think I say 20 words in eight minutes. Granted the guy from the Wall Street Journal doesn’t have much to say either, but at least he’s facing the camera.

The Measure of a Man (Who Emails Anonymously)

July 10, 2009 | Filed under: News

I’ve written a couple of pieces in the New York Times lately that have prompted some fierce emails. The first was on buying a luxury car in a recession. It was called  Even For Luxury Cars, Dickering Is Possible and essentially looked at some of the more archaic practices that dealers still employ to sell you dream vehicles. What piqued my curiosity was that few luxury car dealerships felt compelled to expand their hours or cut prices to sell cars, while some steadfastly refused. The majority of the emails involved people sharing similar experiences, tales of people buying a Mercedes 550 far from their homes to save serious money. But a few emails were filled with bile (and, unfortunately, these are the ones that resonate). They took the tone of “how dare you write about rich people”. I didn’t respond to many of them, out of fear of giving out my email address to a truly kooky bird. But there was one man, a truly Bellovian character, who repeatedly emails me the most vile comments. His most recent one attacked my mother. Because HL, his initials, has a unique name, I googled him and found out he is a mid-level bureaucrat in New York state government, the same New York state government that didn’t meet for weeks during a fiscal crisis. It was a stones in glass houses moment…

Today, I started to receive this week’s stream of invective for Here’s $50 million; What’s Your Risk Tolerance. In this column, I took a behavioral finance test and wrote about the results. Straightforward stuff, I thought. But no sooner was it posted online last night than the emails started coming in. The best one insulted the premise of the piece and then offered to be a source for another column! In other words, you’re wrong because you didn’t quote me!

The responses to the columns brought to mind a story I read about Michael Eisner, when he was running Disney. If he was really mad about something, he would write a letter and then leave it in his desk overnight. The next morning he would usually rewrite it or discard it. The beauty of the web – connection to anyone immediately – is also becoming its ugliest feature: it lets otherwise cowardly people dash off vicious and usually ill-informed emails with impunity. Gone, it seems, are the times of civil discourse and face-to-face discussion – too tough for a coward. The greater risk, I fear, is our skins will grow too thick and we’ll tune out anyone who disagrees with us.

The Tennis Match

July 9, 2009 | Filed under: News

I was on Fox News’ The Strategy Room today. This clip talking about Sarah Palin makes me look like a referee in a tennis match.

Stop the presses!

June 17, 2009 | Filed under: News

I don’t want to brag, but a PR person sent me a link to my New York Times column that made me swell with pride. This week’s Wealth Matters column – How Do I Know You’re Not Bernie Madoff? – was about making sure your financial advisor is not the next super swindler or that the investments he suggests are not vast Ponzi schemes.  Now, I’m used to it garnering emails from all over but this week was different. The story got picked up by The Tehran Times, which published it with the same headline but no byline. The paper is billed as Iran’s leading international daily, and I’m pretty sure none of my friend have a clip like this. My only complaint is the paper’s editors don’t seem to have long attention spans: they lobbed off over half of it. Then again, the Iranians have slightly more pressing matters to contend with right now…