A trolley comes to Phoenix: Tendency in reporting and why it matters

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

So it’s almost five days since I dropped the dime on the bribe gifts being thrust upon the contributors to AG. Has anyone publicly renounced them so far? We got to see Jay Thompson issue some tepid caveats about the gift products — from our pages, not AG’s. And we got to watch in horror as Russell Shaw imploded, which wasn’t pretty. But if anyone has actually come out and said, “Get thee behind me, Satan!” — I’m not aware of it.

Doesn’t much matter, by now. The moment is gone.

You — meaning you, the invisible reader — will react as you choose, and that is not only your business, but it’s your perfect right. But I can give you a very simple lens for understanding the issue, one that not even the chorus line of tap-dancers who showed up in our comments could manage to gainsay:

Suppose you are finally about to be interviewed by the real estate reporter from your local “City” magazine. Very big deal, very exciting, maybe your chance to break through to the target market you’ve spent a fortune trying to attract. But then you discover that the reporter has taken $2,000 in in-kind gifts from your fiercest competitor. How does that make you feel? Is it possible that the reporter is on the up and up and the gifts mean nothing? Well… yeahhhh… Is is plausible to you that you are about to be served up like a plate half full of cold leftovers? That’s what’s running through your head, isn’t it? Taking expensive gifts from people you write about doesn’t mean you are necessarily corrupt, but it sure makes you look and smell corrupt.

In our comments threads, there were a lot of specious arguments made in defense of taking these bribes, or at least not renouncing them. One of them was the notion that “everyone is biased.” This is a very common fallacious dodge — which is to say a persuasively invalid argument. We start by acknowledging the obvious facts that each of us has a unique point of view, and each of us is operating from limited information. The fallacious dodge is to imply that these facts are equal to corruption.

Like this: Miss Misled is in deep earnest, is striving to be impartial but, alas, is factually in error in the position she has taken.

Mister Crooked is shamelessly and recklessly mouthing the specious propaganda has has been paid to spread to a gullible public.

Neither Miss Misled nor Mister Crooked is factually correct in their pronouncements. But those pronouncements are not morally equal — very far from it. Miss Misled has made a mistake, but Mister Crooked is deliberately lying to you.

(Every logical fallacy can be understood at this level of detail if you take the time to take them apart. Learning to reason according to the rules of sound rhetoric could be a worthy goal for 2009.)

In this particular instance the purpose of the rhetorical dodge is to fudge the difference between honest bias and dishonest tendency.

Tendency or tendentiousness is an attempt to deliberately mislead people into doing something they otherwise would not do. I can think of two flavors, political tendency and pecuniary tendency.

The latter is what salespeople are often accused of — not always without justice. It consists of fudging facts and tickling emotions to get people to do things that will be profitable to the proponent.

We’re more apt to excuse political tendency — to our peril. Politicians lie to us in order to get more power or to pay off their supporters — themselves most often advocates of pecuniary tendency.

The funniest stooges in this charade are the taxpayers, of course, who get whipped this way and that, getting their pockets picked all the while.

The saddest clowns, to me, are the newspaper and TV reporters, who deploy the tools of political tendency for no gain of their own, but simply because they are puerile believers in the beauty and justice of whipping innocent taxpayers and picking their pockets.

We’re watching all of this happen right now, in Phoenix, as we become the latest city to be encysted with that risible product of political tendency known as “light rail.”

If you understand railroading, you will know that, whatever “light rail” might be, what you are looking at in the picture shown above is a trolley car. Absolutely everything about this boondoggle is a lie, starting with its name.

There are many, many more lies behind this trolley:

• Like all municipal transit systems, it cannot possibly ever make a profit
• According to its builders’ own projections, only one car in 1,000 will be taken off the roads by the trolley
• That same report admits that the trolley will make both traffic and air pollution worse, not better
• There is no profitable route for a trolley in Phoenix, but the route that would lose the least money — north and south on Central Avenue from Dunlap to Baseline Roads — was not used; this is the route with the greatest concentrations of bus passengers right now
• The second-least-unprofitable route — north and south on Central Avenue from Dunlap to Buckeye Roads, east and west from there along Buckeye Road/University Drive through the airport, through ASU, and then perhaps north and south on Alma School Road to the commercial heart of Mesa — was also not used
• Instead, bowing to the political tendency of wealthy homeowners in Phoenix, to the political tendency of ASU in Tempe and to the pecuniary tendency of the aging burghers of Mesa, the trolley meanders along a route that is often stupid and useless — unless you understand political and pecuniary tendency
• The failure to connect through the airport, in particular, will cost the taxpayers another $2 billion to build yet another trolley system to connect with this one — even though the stupid route chosen parallels the freeway that runs through the airport from less than one mile away!
• ASU is building a completely redundant medical school in gritty downtown Phoenix in a give-back of political tendency; by forcing undergrads to take at least one round-trip a day for their core classes in Tempe, ASU is artificially boosting the passenger count on the trolley with young, shiny, happy, healthy and prosperous-looking students — each one traveling on a taxpayer-subsidized transit pass
• Taking account of the truly insane route the trolley takes through the campus of ASU, my speculation is that the give-back for the bogus medical school will a rebuilt Sun Devil Stadium — even though the taxpayers just built a brand new football stadium in Glendale
• Though much has been made of the new commercial real estate development along the route of the trolley, little notice has been taken of the hundreds of once-profitable small businesses that were wiped out, either by eminent domain or by trolley construction
• Similarly, hundreds of homeowners were dispossessed by the trolley; going north on 19th Avenue, dozens of homes have been taken even though the trolley may never run that far north
• As you might guess, much of that new commercial real estate development along the route of the trolley is being subsidized by the taxpayers
• In addition, the municipalities along the trolley route have imposed a Transit-Oriented Development zoning overlay to encourage certain kinds of business and to discourage others; in particular, if your business is friendly to drivers, you’re screwed
• As with the bogus ASU medical school, the purpose of the Transit-Oriented Development zoning overlay is to stack the deck in the trolley’s favor: If municipalities can make driving difficult or painful, they hope to compel people to use the trolley
• Even so, in the long run the trolley will result in fewer mass-transit passengers, not more: The massive unprofitability of the trolley will require cuts in much more popular (though still unprofitable) bus lines; this has already started happening
• Even though the trolley is a favorite pet of the political tendencies of Yuppies, particularly, it will turn out to be an unmitigated disaster for the poor — who don’t have any delusions about the “glamor” of mass-transit but have to take it anyway; this is well-established fact in other cities that have built trolley systems
• Even so, in a city where the afternoon high temperature is very often way over 100 degrees — in blistering sunlight, sometimes with fairly high humidity — Yuppies who have to walk some distance, either to their station or from it, will not take the trolley to work; their very expensive clothing would be ruined
• And even though the trolley runs for much of its route behind a curb, and even though the traffic lights have been rejiggered to the trolley’s advantage, nevertheless it will be the source of a huge number of automobile accidents, many of them fatal; this again is well-established fact demonstrated in other trolley-afflicted cities
• If news reports in other trolley-trend cities are any guide, these accidents will either go unreported or will be minimized
• And even though every bit of this is true, none of it will be reported in the mainstream media outlets — not now and probably not ever

This is the curse of tendency. Media outlets in Phoenix have been yammering about this silly trolley system for ten solid years, but almost none of these ugly facts have been reported in the popular media.

And please understand, I like public transportation. I’ve lived in New York and Boston, where mass-transit is actually useful — not profitable, but useful. I used to read all twelve of Ibsen’s “social” plays, in order, every summer, on the MBTA commuter rail on the way into Boston. If it weren’t for the rape of the taxpayers, I’d have nothing but praise for mass-transportation.

And here’s the real kick in the head: Mass-transit might actually be profitable if government would get itself out of the real estate and transportation businesses. We build stupidly because the taxpayers never tire of being raped. The earth is 70% water, and yet, somehow, municipally-managed water-supplies are always in “crisis.” In Phoenix the tap-water tastes like chlorine bleach and dead fish. In preference to getting out of a business they’re obviously incompetent to manage, the city produces agitprop public-service-announcements telling people to serve up tap-water — rife with who knows what kind of poisons and bacteria — with ice and lemons to kill the awful taste and smell. One would think that the more thoughtful kind of taxpayer could catch a clue about government management of what should be commercial enterprises.

But instead, the people want to play with their Toonerville Trolley, no matter what the cost, no matter what the opportunity costs, no matter who gets hurt. That’s really sad, but our own hands are not clean, either. As bad as the trolley might be for everyone, considered as a group, it can be very good for particular individuals — Ibsen readers, perhaps. So here we are pimping the damn thing ourselves. I’m doing a contract later today with a buyer whom I have no doubt will be taking the trolley to and from her job downtown.

But: The point of all this is this: You are being lied to, all the time, by the very people you trust to tell you the truth. There has not been any honest reporting about this trolley system in Phoenix, nor about the water supply, nor about any other pet project of politically tendentious reporters. For seventy years and more we made fun of Soviet-style propaganda — half hysterical hectoring, half saccharine boosterism. Welcome to Soviet America. If any topic of civic life is subject to the political tendencies of reporters, you will not discover the truth by pursuing the popular media.

And it goes for us, too. If we are not doing everything we can to make sure that political or pecuniary tendency is not creeping into our writing, then it probably is. And if we are not doing everything we can to eradicate doubts about our tendencies in the minds of our readers, there is no reason not to expect those doubts to take root.

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