Media

  • 1978 0406 - NYT - $1.9 Million Payment Ordered in Libel Case - [link]
    • A judge has ordered The Twin Falls Times News to pay $1.9 million in libel damages after it refused to disclose its sources for articles that an insurance company said ruined its business.
  • 1989 0501 - National Press Club - Where Was the Press During the S&L Crisis? - [link-CSPAN]
  • The FTC trials-by-the-news-media violate the basic concept of due process and fair play.

1980-1, NAIC Proceedings - 1979 1203 - Wesley J. Kinder, California Insurance Commissioner, Vice-Presidential Address - re: FTC Report - (p8-13) / (p63-68)

  • 2008 0921 - Meet the Press - Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson - [link]
  • Linda M. Lankowski: I think any way that we can make illustrations more understandable to the public is certainly going to help us.
    • We've seen the problems that have occurred when Senator Howard Metzenbaum (D-OH) was given an illustration with a vanishing premium, and he had absolutely no idea that he had bought a policy that was not paid up in four years.
  • It caused many problems for the industry; it caused many problems because the press got involved, and the press doesn't understand the products as well as it thinks it does.

1995 - SOA - Practical Illustrations and Nonforfeiture Values, Society of Actuaries - 14p

  • I would not suggest that compliance with those standards of disclosure, etc. be part of the normal illustration.
  • But perhaps we might, as a profession, want to consider requiring an appropriate actuary in any company to prepare a report subject to our normal actuarial standards process to be available on request.
    • That might itself, through the potential investigations by various types of organizations ranging from regulators to Consumer Reports or whomever you have, go a long way toward enforcing the type of self discipline that we are really looking for here.

--  Bruce Nickerson

1991 - SOA - Illustrations, Society of Actuaries - 20p

  • (p39) - John H. Filer, Chairman of the Board, AETNA Life & Casualty:  Of course, 5.9 percent would not have rated headlines.
    • In that vein, by releasing its report to the press-but not to the industry-prior to its presentation to this Committee, the FTC was successful in orchestrating the news.
      • Its side of the story was the only story the press had to work with.
    • Couple this manipulation with the fact that as a government agency charged with protecting consumers, the Commission's pronouncements are generally taken at face value, it is little wonder that the initial press accounts were so overwhelmingly one sided.
    • This manipulation of the media is bad enough.
      • What's even worse is that the message communicated violates the standards of truthful advertising that the Commission finds objectionable and, indeed, actionable in others.

1979 0710 and 1017 - GOV (Senate) - FTC Study of Life Insurance Cost Disclosure, Howard Cannon (D-NV)   ---  [BonkNote] 

  • (p145) - Q. Are you aware that once a story, for example, a Reuters story, for example, appears in a publication, that fairly quickly, and not infrequently, hundreds of news stories follow, that you can pick up on Google, where that same story is...
  • (p143) - A. No. I think that we see -- we've seen in the 1990s that the public press wrote article after article suggesting that the banking industry in the United States was in terminal condition, and yet there was no reduction in cash flows in the banking industry because of FDIC insurance.
    • So I think if the public feels that a bank is backed by FDIC insurance, the public will not take its money out of the bank.
  • (p173) - Q. What about that portion of a Bank's deposits are in Excess of FDIC Insurance? 

New York Times Link - BankAtlantic v Richard Bove - 482p