I appreciate that mainstream news sources are finally reporting on the stories of people who lose their homes to foreclosures. It’s well past time, especially considering that home foreclosures are reaching Great Depression levels.

I dunno though, this CNN clip irritated me. For one thing, the voice over was smarmy–I was reminded of a Saturday Night Live skit through the whole segment.

Along with the smarmy voice over there was the way the woman was presented–as sort of a sad screw up that we can laugh at. That is, what sort of screw up that runs a business on how to prevent foreclosures gets foreclosed on??

Since the segment didn’t more closely examine the woman’s profession as it connected to her foreclosure status, it gives the viewer an easy way to explain her foreclosure status: she’s just a bad business woman (and a slightly comical one at that). Or, on other words, it’s not that foreclosures could happen to anybody and we all should be worried about it–it’s that people in foreclosure didn’t read their papers closely enough and somehow thought they were above making mistakes.

I’m still waiting for the day when a mainstream news source will compassionately and with *nuance* examine the effect of the foreclosure crisis on U.S. citizens. Something tells me that I’m gonna be waiting a while.